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Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge and
Truth in Plato
Stepping Past the Shadow
of Socrates
Catherine Rowett
1
3
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Preface
I. About the Reader’s Views on Plato

Almost everyone—among those who are likely to read this book, at least—has a view
on what Plato was trying to do, and what Platonism is. Many also think that Plato was
badly wrong about a great many things.
I will have achieved what I hope to achieve in this book if, after reading it, almost
everyone has changed their mind, either wholly or partly, about what Plato was
trying to do and what Platonism is, and I especially hope that, after reading it, those
who used to think that what Plato was doing was wrongheaded have begun to think
afresh. Perhaps there are some readers from whose eyes scales will fall. That would
be good, if so.
If not, then I hope that will be because all these truths were already out there, and
evident, and not everyone needed to rethink it. Perhaps some will need more time and
more discussion. The present volume examines a very small part of the whole story.
II. What I Am Trying to Do in This Book

In this volume I try to reconsider, using Plato as a guide, some major and controversial
issues in epistemology and philosophy of language. These have to do, first, with what I
shall call ‘conceptual competence’—particularly with the issue of what kind of know-
ledge is involved in grasping a concept, such as when we know what a game is or what
justice is. Is this a kind of knowing how? Is it knowledge of some fact or proposition, or
of a definition, or necessary and sufficient conditions for applying a term, or a rule of
conduct for applying a term? Is it like knowing an object? I shall argue that it is none of
the above, but that it is something else, more primitive and fundamental, that under-
pins the ability to do those things—and that those abilities, some or all of them in each
case, are characteristic of someone who knows, but not necessary or sufficient for some-
one to be a knower.
Second, I shall be concerned with the notion of ‘truth’. I shall argue that the range of
things that can be true is more extensive than has typically been allowed in recent ana-
lytic philosophy, and that there is a connection between truth and a certain sort of
‘being’ that Plato attributes to the Forms. We shall consider what kind of being this is,
and why it is still interesting. I aim to show that it occupies an irreducible place in
Plato’s understanding of conceptual knowledge and meaning, and that it is worth
recovering for our own use.
These are contributions to questions in contemporary philosophy, which also con-
tribute to contemporary debates about how to read Plato. Using Plato’s leads, I shall be
vi Preface
putting forward proposals that I consider to be serious contenders for solving or clari-
fying these questions about knowledge, conceptual competence, and truth; but the
proposals are also intended to be serious contenders for clarifying what Plato himself
was talking about, and I aim to improve our understanding of what he meant when he
referred to ‘knowledge’ (episteme), and when he talked about ‘truth’ (aletheia) and
‘being’ (ousia and to on).
Hence the main chapters of this book defend a novel reading of large parts of Plato’s
corpus. This will naturally be of interest to those who already believe that Plato’s views
are important. But I trust that it will be of interest also to some who may currently
believe that there is nothing of any interest in what Plato had to say about Forms, or
about truth, or about definitions and essences, or about science and what kind of thing
we can know. My reading is designed to undermine many of the objections to Platonism
that are typically bandied about, which are often directed against some caricature of
Plato’s epistemology and metaphysics. To show that such objections typically miss
Plato’s point, and thereby miss a range of promising answers to current topics of enquiry,
I have included substantial chapters that explore key texts from some of the most fam-
ous dialogues, reinterpreting them to show that Plato probably means something quite
different from what he has standardly been taken to mean. There is also more of this
work to come, on texts not included in this book, but here we make a start towards
developing these claims, defending them with close attention to some prominent texts.
My aim is to show that we should not try to reduce conceptual knowledge to some
other kind of knowledge, as though the list of basic kinds of knowledge were complete
at ‘know-how’, ‘acquaintance’, and ‘propositional’. Even less should we try to reduce one
or more of those three to one among them that is supposedly more fundamental. I shall
argue that there is a fundamental difference between knowledge of types and know-
ledge of tokens, and that all the kinds of knowledge that consist in seeing tokens as fall-
ing under types are parasitic on a more fundamental kind of knowledge—grasping the
type in question—which is not reducible to anything else, because all our knowledge of
facts, propositions, actions, and things presuppose a prior grasp of types. Whenever we
see some item as belonging to a class or deserving a certain description, we call upon a
repertoire of conceptual knowledge which—as I shall argue—cannot be reduced to any
finite set of propositions and is often not even expressible in propositional form; nor is it
reducible to any finite rule for how to continue a certain practice consistently (since the
practice may be creative, inconsistent, impromptu, and innovative).
Any agent capable of using language or classifying and reading the world draws upon
a repertoire of available descriptors (maybe linguistic, maybe practical/pragmatic)
whose meaning and relevance to the task at hand the agent grasps, sometimes in a
wholly inarticulate way. This repertoire enables conceptually equipped agents to see
things as instantiating types or kinds,1 and to extend the concepts indefinitely, to
1
Among conceptually equipped agents I include all animals that see the world in terms of kinds rele-
vant to their tasks and can engage with their environment on that basis.
Preface vii
embrace and redescribe new examples in an intelligent and creative way, rather than
mechanically. Extensions and innovations are clearly not pre-programmed, since they
can be controversial, a subject of debate and uncertainty, and innovations that were
once unacceptable can become accepted.
Obviously we must possess a certain idea before we can innovate with it. But what is
that knowledge, such that someone who possesses it can recognize familiar cases,
handle unforeseen possibilities unfazed, apply the descriptor intelligently beyond its
normal application and in metaphorical or strangely reconfigured circumstances, and
reject it in other cases that are too alien? How is it that on the basis of our idea of justice,
which we may never have seen properly instantiated anywhere, we can discern justice
and injustice in situations never before envisaged, and discuss cases that might be
unclear, ruling that they are or are not examples of justice, or that they are marginal or
irrelevant to judgements of that kind? For an adequate account of this kind of know-
ledge, Plato’s model seems to me to be far superior to any propositional or definitional
or rule-based models. Plato, I shall suggest, models this knowledge as a quasi-visual
grasp of ‘justice itself ’. A key theme of this book is what Plato has to say about the
method by which we learn (or re-acquire) those ideas, and become philosophically
aware of them: namely, as I shall argue, that we acquire this knowledge by a kind of
analogical or pictorial reasoning, based on a very small sample—even just one example
which could in fact be a bad or negative example (as e.g. we may come to see what
justice is from encountering a peculiarly telling case of injustice). He correctly identi-
fies, I suggest, a kind of picturing process that enables a conceptually competent
thinker to grasp an abstract idea of great complexity and subtlety, by abstracting (or
ascending) from small and unrepresentative samples. The process is not induction, or
empirical generalization, since it can be done from one encounter alone, or from
untypical ones, or even from the total absence of any instance. It is also possible to gen-
erate an understanding (as we shall see) by constructing an imaginary instance, unlike
any known in real life.
To get hold of the idea of justice, we do not need to have encountered any sound or
exemplary cases of justice; nor do we get the idea by habit or practice, or by learning
from role models; but it is to our existing idea of justice that we turn to see what would
be the just thing to do in situations not specified in advance. This grasp of the concept
(our idea of what justice is) provides a more accurate and authoritative basis for judge-
ment than common practices that are considered just. The latter will always fall short
for various reasons, and our ability to pass judgement on those practices reveals that
we have a more authoritative grasp of the notion in ourselves: so we can criticize our-
selves and others for not doing in practice what we know in theory; and we can criticize
ourselves and others for being unable to explain or define something that we know and
can correctly deploy in practice. These discrepancies (a) between our intellectual grasp
of things like justice, honesty, etc., and our attempts to be just or honest in real life, or
(b) between our ability to act justly/honestly and our ability to explain what justice or
honesty is in words—these show that we find ourselves able to correct both our actions
viii Preface
and our words by reference to something else—our knowledge of what justice and
honesty are—which, I argue, is epistemically more basic than the practices, and gener-
ally inadequately enacted in practice and inadequately expressed, or even inexpress-
ible, in words. On the basis of this fundamental knowledge of ‘what it is’ about the
relevant concepts, we can also recognize which instances are truly exemplary and
reject those that are not. Such corrective knowledge is the basis of all social, moral,
political, and artistic criticism and progress. Knowledge of facts is as nothing in com-
parison with this, when it comes to its importance for human life. It is this knowledge,
I suggest, that makes facts possible.
Thinking of this knowledge as quasi-pictorial helps us to understand how it can be
dense with meaning, yielding unlimited answers to an infinite range of unforeseen
questions. It is rather like consulting a map or drawing, in terms of the density of
its information, as contrasted with written directions that tell you just one or two
ways to go.
III. How to Read This Book

This book is addressed to two audiences. On the one hand, it is for those philosophers
who want to know what I am saying about the missing notion of conceptual know-
ledge, and about the role of ‘picturing’ as a means of capturing what kind of knowledge
that is. For them too, I want to explain in fairly straightforward terms how Plato
emerges as a ‘good guy’ in his creative work on these things. On the other hand, it is
also for those who want to see, in much more exegetical detail, exactly how that answer
can be seen to emerge, and how richly it emerges, from Plato’s texts. For these readers
there are substantial discussions of Plato’s texts, and some dialectical engagement with
various earlier treatments of those texts that dominate existing readings.
To meet the needs of both audiences, I have structured the book in a somewhat
unusual way. I hope that many readers will want to think deeply about both parts of my
project: that even those whose primary interest is in some contemporary debate about
conceptual knowledge will also want to understand Plato’s importance in that field
and the dazzling splendour of his treatment of it. But it should also be possible to read
this book (a) just for its new readings of certain well-trodden works of Plato (without
asking whether the problem that he is solving is one that modern epistemology and
philosophy of language need to address) or (b) just for its contribution to issues about
knowledge and truth (without much concern for whether Plato was really saying all
that). To enable both ways of reading the book, I have tried to signpost it so that readers
can find the parts that are most relevant to their own concerns. First, the two chapters
in Part I, one on knowledge and one on truth, explain my overall thesis, and situate it in
relation to past work on Plato, and current issues in the relevant philosophical
domains. This Part of the book offers some new ideas, but it is not designed to engage
thoroughly with the immense current literature in either of those fields. After that,
Parts II–IV explore Plato’s work in the Meno, Republic, and Theaetetus respectively.
Preface ix
I begin each part with an ‘Introduction and Summary’, which sets out my basic claims
with respect to the dialogue under discussion, and evaluates their significance for the
overall thesis of the book. These are partly for hasty readers with no time for wading
through the exegetical material, or for non-specialist readers who are not concerned
with the detailed exegesis. Such readers can settle for reading the first chapter in each
Part of the book. But those chapters are also designed as orientation for the specialist
reader, setting the agenda and explaining the significance of each move, before
embarking on the longer chapters in which the exegetical proofs are done. The exeget-
ical chapters which comprise the rest of each Part of the book attempt to show how one
can read the text with those results, and engage in varying levels of nitty-gritty detail
with both the Greek text and with a selection of the work of other scholars, classic or
recent, who have offered rival views.
Those seven exegetical chapters (Chapters 4–5, 7–8, and 10–12) are internally sign-
posted with headings, which summarize the progress of the argument. This means that
by reading just the headings, one gets a kind of précis or list of premises and conclu-
sions. The headings are also designed to enable someone who is not reading the book
from cover to cover, but looking for its argument on some particular passage or its
solution to some tricky dilemma, to locate the argument and easily identify what my
view on the issue is. The index locorum can also assist with this. Wherever possible, my
proposed answer is stated in the heading.
The book concludes with a chapter that is neither exegetical nor evaluative, but more
an outline promise of things to come, since there are many further texts that would
be relevant.
IV. Numbering System for Quoted Texts

I discuss certain passages of text in some detail in the main exegetical chapters of
the book, and occasionally in the ‘Introduction and Summary’ chapters for the main
parts of the book. As well as referencing each excerpt in the standard way, I have also
numbered these texts consecutively, in the order in which I present them within the
chapter, preceded by the chapter number. For instance, Text 4.3 is the third text quoted
in Chapter 4. I then cross-refer to those excerpts by their numbers. All translations
are my own.
Contents
Acknowledgements xix
Part I. Knowledge, Truth, and Belief

1. Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route
to Grasping an Idea 3
I. In Which We Consider Whether ‘Knowledge’ Is an Important Topic
in Plato’s Work 3
I.i That there is an irreducible form of knowledge that has to do with
grasping concepts and types or forms; I.ii That Lyons’s ‘structural
semantics’ approach to understanding Plato’s term episteme needs to be
superseded; I.iii Whether ‘knowledge’ is a useful translation for Plato’s
knowledge words; I.iv That knowledge is not a species of (propositional)
belief, and that Plato does not mean ‘belief ’ when he speaks of doxa
II. In Which We Classify Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Plato’s
Epistemology Into Roughly Three Distinct Views, and I Place My View
in This Taxonomy (or Outside It) 11
II.i That there are two classic ways of understanding the relation between
Plato’s Middle and Later dialogues, one unitarian and one developmental,
and a third way that is also unitarian; II.ii Some further options; II.iii That
my interpretation is a variant of the first type; II.iv That the contrast
between episteme and doxa is the contrast between the grasp of types
or concepts and the recognition of tokens or instances
III. In Which We Consider Whether it Is a Good Idea to Look for a Definition,
and, If So, Why 23
III.i That definition can serve three different roles in philosophical work, only
one of which is part of a philosophical method; III.ii That failing to find a
definition can be a fruitful part of a philosophical investigation, when the
author’s aim is to problematize faulty assumptions or diagnose confusion;
III.iii That the definition does not need to be in terms understood by the
interlocutor, nor does Socrates (or Plato) think that it does
IV. In Which We Investigate How Knowing Relates to Factual Information
and Propositional Utterances or Beliefs 27
IV.i That knowledge should not be equated with the ability to do something,
or to express a belief in words, although those abilities may be evidence of
knowing; IV.ii That some other kinds of knowing, besides knowing particular
facts about states of affairs, are more important for understanding what Plato is
talking about; IV.iii That the ability to read the world as made up of tokens that
instantiate types is like using a map, dense with pictorial information
V. In Which I Summarize the Plan for the Rest of This Book 33
xii Contents
2. Truth and Belief 34

I. In Which We Consider the Relation Between Knowledge and Truth, and
Between Knowledge and Belief 34
I.i That knowledge is about something, but not about a proposition, or about
the truth of a proposition; I.ii That it is a mistake to suppose (with Vendler
and others) that belief, but not knowledge, is a propositional attitude
II. In Which We Consider What Truth Is, and How It Can Be a
Property of Things 40
II.i That there are several ways of talking of ‘truth’ in Greek; II.ii That we
should understand the veridical sense of the verb ‘to be’ as a reference to the
truth in things, which is a kind of being something; II.iii That truth in
sentences and descriptions is derivative from the primary kind of truth in
things; II.iv That some truth can be found in what Heidegger and Detienne
say about aletheia; II.v That there is something similar in Aristotle; II.vi That
it is time to reclaim the spectator model of knowledge and truth
III. That Truth Can Be Observed by Viewing the Things That Reflect It 49
III.i That all kinds of deliberate representations and naturally occurring
instances can serve as icons, and that Plato’s methodology makes use of this
Part II. Plato’s Meno

3. Introduction and Summary for Part II: Plato’s Meno55
I. In Which We Note That Plato Is Arguing on the Same Side as Wittgenstein,
Against Socratic Essentialism 55
II. That the Geometry Episode Proves That One Can Identify a Precise but
Indefinable Length by Pointing, Not Saying 56
III. That Socrates Turns to the Hypothetical Method Not as a Second Best, but as
the Perfect Method for Dealing with Types That Have No Essential Definition 58
IV. That Knowing ‘What It Is’ About Some Type F Does Not Equate to Knowing
Which Tokens Fall Under the Type, or to a Description of the Shared
Properties of F Things, or to Any Classification of the F as a Token of a
More Generic Type 59
IV.i That the dichotomy between knowing an object and knowing a proposition
is a false one, and that Socrates means neither of those things when he speaks
of knowing virtue ‘what it is’; IV.ii That the example of ‘knowing Meno, who
he is’ is about a type, not a token, exactly like the case of virtue
V. That the Distinction Between Episteme and Doxa in Plato Is the Distinction
Between the Intellectual Grasp of the Type and the Experiential Recognition
of Particular Tokens, Whether With the Senses or Just in the Mind 65
4. Knowing What Virtue Is in Plato’s Meno69
I. In Which We Consider How We Should Read the Meno 69
I.i That we must distinguish between Plato and his characters, including the
Socrates character; I.ii A review of the key turning points in the dialogue,
which show that Socrates caused the confusion by insisting on the priority
of definition; I.iii That Plato’s chosen illustration, the search for the
Contents xiii
indefinable side of the double square, is intended to prove that what

someone knows may not be definable (by anyone, in principle, not just in
practice); I.iv That Socrates still wants to know ‘what virtue is’ before asking
other questions, but knowing ‘what it is’ no longer means giving a definition
II. In Which We Note That the Hypothetical Method (If Well Done) Is Ideal
for Poion Esti Questions About Vague Concepts With No Neat Definitions 76
II.i The failure of the hypothetical method: that Socrates is to blame;
II.ii A better attempt at explaining how we become competent with the
virtue concept without any need to define it
III. In Which We Conclude That Not Being Able to Say ‘What It Is’ Concerning
Some Concept Is Perfectly Compatible With Knowing ‘What It Is’ 82
5. Knowledge and Correct Impressions in Plato’s Meno84
I. Orientation: Issues About the Relation Between Doxa and Episteme
Arising From Chapter 4 84
II. Concerning Passage A: The Opening Pages of the Meno (70a–71e) 85
II.i That there is no one left in Athens who can answer Meno’s question,
‘because Gorgias has gone to Larissa’; II.ii That Socrates cannot answer
Meno’s question ‘because he does not know the answer’
III. Passage C: How Knowledge Differs From a Merely Correct Impression 87
III.i Passage C, stage 1: it is possible to answer a question from a position
that is not knowledge; III.ii Passage C, stage 2: the road to Larissa;
III.iii Passage C, stage 3: knowledge about and knowledge of;
III.iv Passage C, stage 4: the advantage of knowledge over true seeming;
III.v Passage C, stage 5: the statues of Daedalus, and explanatory
reasoning; III.vi Passage C, stage 6: a difficulty—do seemings become knowings?
IV. Passage B: Lessons From the Slave-Boy Passage 99
IV.i That ‘the boy did not already know’, meaning ‘the boy did not have
the knowledge already available’; and that Socrates does not teach him
anything that he did not know; IV.ii Passage B continues: the boy did
have knowledge; IV.iii Locating the back reference in Passage C
V. Once Again, Can True Doxa Turn Into Knowledge? 103
VI. Conclusion: That Neither Doxa Nor Episteme Is a Propositional Attitude 106
Part III. Plato’s Republic

6. Introduction and Summary for Part III: Plato’s Republic111
I. In Which We Consider the Plan of the Republic, and Why the Quest
for a Definition Is Abandoned 111
II. That We Can Avoid Ascribing Fallacies to Plato Once We Understand
Plato’s Method 112
7. Discovering What Justice Is in Plato’s Republic115
I. In Which We Examine the Argument of the Republic and Discover That
Plato Is Not Trying to Define Justice but Is Using a Method That Bypasses
the Need for Definition 115
xiv Contents
II. In Which We Examine the Text More Closely, to Reconstruct the Hunt
for the City’s Justice in Republic 4, and We Discover No Definition 118
II.i That the hunting in Passage A is a hunt for the city’s justice, not for
justice as such; II.ii That the method and the finding are comparable to
finding the line on the diagram in the Meno, and to the things admired by
the lovers of sights and sounds; II.iii That this ought to be a bad answer to
the ‘what is justice?’ question, by Socrates’ own previous standards;
II.iv Ontological interlude: Forms and tropes
III. In Which We Consider How Socrates Is Able to Move Forward From
Identifying the Justice of a Particular City, to Grasping What Justice Is 123
III.i That Socrates uses the analogy of rubbing sticks together to explain
his method; III.ii That there are other passages that explain the method;
III.iii That the ambitions of the method are not to define justice
IV. In Which We Consider David Sachs’s Objection, That There Is a Fallacy of
Equating ‘Platonic Justice’ With ‘Vulgar Justice’ 128
IV.i That the shift to the inner disposition is already explained in Adeimantus’s
challenge in Book 2; IV.ii Three ways to read the passage about temple-raiding in
Republic 4, of which the third is neither fallacious nor reductionist
V. In Which We Consider the Accusation From Bernard Williams That the
Analogy Between Soul and State Will Not Support Socrates’ Desired
Conclusions 134
V.i That Williams is assuming (a) that the soul/state comparison is an
analogy and (b) that Plato is pursuing an essentialist agenda; V.ii That
Williams constructs a story of crisis, and attempted, but ineffective, solution,
which is of his own making; V.iii That a better interpretation is possible,
if we avoid attributing any essentialist or reductionist moves to Plato
VI. Conclusion 140
8. Platonic Method: The Philosopher’s Route to Knowledge
in Plato’s Republic142
I. In Which We Juxtapose Socrates’ Comments About Short Versus Long
Routes and About Outlines Versus Finished Drawings, to See Why
Socrates Is Employing a Method That Is Not the Best 142
I.i That Socrates identifies, and follows, a shortcut method of enquiry
that is not good enough for the Guardians, but is enough for now;
I.ii That Socrates never embarks upon the longer way; I.iii That Socrates
takes a route that is third best, in the Sun analogy; I.iv That the Republic
aims at no more detail than is required for the target question, and
that this is what is meant by contrasting outlines with finished works
II. In Which We Consider the Implications of 505a–506d, Where Socrates
Rejects Two Candidate Definitions of the Good, Indicating a General
Problem for the Definitional Project 148
III. In Which We Consider the Role of Icons in the Divided Line 150
III.i That the Line is set up to explain why shadows are epistemically
valuable, and informative, for philosophical enquiry; III.ii That the same
Contents xv
relation, of icon to original, characterizes the higher levels of the Divided

Line, and this explains how the method in the Republic is supposed to work;
III.iii That we can solve some puzzles about the ratios on the Divided Line,
once we see that the degree of clarity is measured by how direct is the access
to truth provided by that kind of investigation; III.iv That there is a missing
section at the bottom of the Divided Line
IV. In Which We Consider What Is Meant by the Talk of ‘Hypotheses’ in the
Divided Line 156
IV.i That the hypotheses (or ‘posits’) are entities, not axioms; IV.ii What it
means to treat the posits as sources, at Level 3 of the Line; IV.iii What
happens at Level 4 of the Line, when we no longer appeal to posits as sources;
IV.iv That even at Level 4, the dialectician may use an iconic method;
IV.v That the content of knowledge at all levels of the Line is perceptual
or quasi-visual and conceptual, and never propositional
V. In Which We Consider Whether Socrates Still Thinks That a Person
Who Knows Must Be Able to Give a Logos of What She Knows 163
V.i That the effect of knowledge is to make a person capable of giving
an explanation, even if the knowledge does not consist of propositions
or definitions; V.ii A counter-argument and my response
VI. Conclusion: That the Ideal City Serves Not to Provide a Definition but as
an Icon of Justice, From Which We Can Ascend to a Grasp of Justice Itself 166
Part IV. Plato’s Theaetetus

9. Introduction and Summary for Part IV: Plato’s Theaetetus169
I. On the Post-Natal Role of Socrates as Midwife, and the Exposure of
Theaetetus’s First Brainchild 171
I.i That the midwife has a twofold role; I.ii That Theaetetus’s first
brainchild is consigned to the discard pile, once its auxiliary theories
have been found too extreme to survive; I.iii That Theaetetus’s second
proposal, that science is true discernment, is also supported with elaborate
survival aids and then rejected as non-viable by the midwife; I.iv That
the third brainchild also proves too sick to save
II. On the Search for a Science of Ousia 175
II.i That the Interlude redefines aisthesis as a technical term for sensory
perception, as distinct from doxa; II.ii That Socrates and Theaetetus are
mistakenly looking among the cognitive contents of doxa for what they
need, namely a grasp of ousia; II.iii That Theaetetus is too young and
inexperienced in dialectic to understand why his second thesis has failed;
II.iv That perception and doxa, whether true or false, presuppose another
kind of knowledge, namely knowing ‘what it is’ about the type
10. Geometry and the Scientific Project: Theaetetus 142a–184b 181
I. In Which We Discover the Significance of Theaetetus’s Aptitude for
Geometry and of His Premature Death 181
xvi Contents
I.i That the search for a definition of episteme must fail, and this is partly
because Theaetetus is too young
II. In Which We Consider Whether Listing Examples Could Be a Good
Answer, and Discover Why Socrates’ Analysis of Clay Is an Unhelpful Model 185
II.i That mentioning examples is part of the iconic method, and that Socrates’
objections to the examples, and his recommended kind of analysis, are not
the usual ones, but are nonetheless misguided; II.ii That Theaetetus’s three
definitions of episteme are all designed to follow the model of a simple
compositional analysis, which is a faulty model and leads to failure;
II.iii That there is nothing wrong with using the term that is to be defined,
and that Socrates is confused on that score
III. In Which We Briefly Consider Theaetetus’s Proposal That Science Is
‘Perception’: Whether It Is a Good Suggestion and Why It Fails to Thrive 192
III.i That Theaetetus conceives his proposed definitions by the iconic method,
generalizing from his experience of geometry as a science, and that his first
proposal has some merits, since knowledge of concepts is a bit like perception;
III.ii That Socrates respects the standard constraints on what can count as
science, in developing his support package for EA
IV. Conclusion: That Geometry Invites the Thought That We Perceive
the Intelligible Types in the Diagram, and That No Other Scientific
Knowledge Is Presupposed 195
11. The Division Between Sense Perception and Non-Sensory Doxa in the
Interlude: Theaetetus 184a–187b 197
I. In Which We Clarify the Meaning of Doxa and Doxazein in the Rest
of the Dialogue 197
I.i That ‘believe’ or ‘judge’ are not good translations for D, and why not;
I.ii That when Socrates lists ‘being’ as (hypothetically) one of the features
accessible to D but not SP, he does not mean propositional form
II. In Which We Take Issue With Some Classic Interpretations of the
Interlude and Their More Recent Descendants 201
II.i That there are four ways of reading the reference to ‘being’, and that
the most popular reading takes it as marking a feature of propositions;
II.ii That many interpretations cobble together Reading C and Reading P,
sometimes with other interpretations as well, in trying to make sense
of Plato’s text
III. In Which We Embark on a Reading of the Interlude and Note That Socrates
Distinguishes Two Faculties Equipped to Detect Non-Propositional
Features, One With, and One Without, the Use of Bodily Organs 208
III.i That Socrates explains his distinction between SP and D by giving
lists of paradigm cases; III.ii That the argument does not assume that all
sensibles are special sensibles, accessible to only one sense; III.iii Whether
we see with our eyes or with our souls, and why stipulating some technical
terminology helps the argument here (but has nothing to do with correcting
Contents xvii
an earlier mistake or inventing a unified consciousness); III.iv That the

thought experiment at 185b is not a mistake, but reinforces the key premise,
to ensure it is understood; III.v That the ‘being’ in List B is not the copula,
and that propositional form characterizes enquiry (both sensory and
dianoetic), but not its conclusions; III. vi That nothing much hangs on
the claim that some features in List A or B are ‘common’; III.vii That
when Socrates links being with truth, this is not because they are
propositional; III.viii That we should respect the fact that the text lists
‘being’ as one of several doxastic features
IV. In Which I Canvass a Solution to the Puzzle, by Suggesting That Socrates
and Theaetetus are Right That Science Must Access the Truth, But Are
Mistaken About What Truth Is, About Its Relation to Being, and
That Doxa Captures the Relevant Kind of Truth 220
IV.i That situating the Interlude alongside the Phaedo and the ‘digression’
in the Theaetetus is informative; IV.ii That the Interlude seems to confuse
the discovery of certain List B features with discovering the ‘ti esti’;
IV.iii That an alternative possibility, whereby the Interlude draws the
same distinction as the Phaedo, seems less convincing on balance;
IV.iv That doxa can indeed discern instances of being, in some sense
of ‘being’, but not in the sense relevant for episteme; IV.v That Plato
has not changed his model of episteme, which is still the science that
grasps ‘what it is’ about a type
V. Conclusion: That Doxa Will Not Be a Good Place to Look For Episteme,
Given What Episteme Is About 230
12. On the Failure of the Remaining Two Attempts to Analyse Episteme:
Theaetetus 187b–210a 231
I. In Which We Consider What ‘True’ Means, When Theaetetus
Says That ‘There Is Also False Doxa’, and Conclude That He Is
Noting the Difference Between Correct and Incorrect Answers to
‘What Is It?’ Questions 231
I.i That Theaetetus, being misled by the irrelevant contrast sketched in
the Interlude, tries to analyse science as a subset of doxa; I.ii That there
are two notions of truth at work in the dialogue; I.iii That when Theaetetus
contrasts true and false doxa he must mean ‘true’ in the folk sense
II. In Which We Consider the Falsity Problems That Socrates Raises, and
How They Contribute to the Discussion 235
II.i That ETD fails because it cannot distinguish knowledge of types from
discernment of tokens, which is parasitic on the former; II.ii That the ETD
brainchild cannot survive, because it undermines itself; for if it were correct,
neither truth nor falsity would be possible, even in discerning the identity
of singular tokens; II.iii That Plato is not confused and is not struggling;
II.iv That false doxa of the relevant kind is not due to ‘ignorance birds’,
but uses the same conceptual tools as true judgements on the same matters
xviii Contents
III. In Which We Examine Why Socrates Concludes the Examination of

ETD With the Jury Example 241
III.i That the jury example is vague, intuitive, and offers no theoretical
explanation of the reason why; III.ii That we should remember how, in
the Digression, Socrates spoke about the lack of time for the lawyers to do
their job properly in the law courts
IV. In Which We Consider the TDL Analysis, and Socrates’ Attempts to
Devise a Rescue Package for It 248
IV.i That the Dream theory tries to explain what puts an object out of
reach of science, on the mistaken assumption that science consists in the
analysis of composites into their components; IV.ii That Socrates provides
support by seeking potentially helpful meanings of logos, and that the
first two kinds of logos—though inadequate for the task—are not so
simple-minded as they seem; IV.iii That the third suggestion is also
somewhat trickier to understand than it seems, and that Plato is not
secretly recommending it; IV.iv That the survey of meanings of logos is
probably not noticeably incomplete; IV.v That regardless of whether the
discussion has been exhaustive, TDL still fails
V. Conclusion: That Plato Is Not in the Same Position as Socrates,
Since He Never Approved of the Naturalistic Project That Socrates
Pursues in This Dialogue 257
Part V. The Bigger Picture

13. Conclusions and Further Tasks 261
I. Where Are We Now? 261
I.i A retrospective on certain unexpected results of this enquiry;
I.ii That we need a special sense of ‘is’ for knowing ‘what it is’ in the
ti esti sense; I.iii That the key to reading Plato can sometimes lie in the
dramatic setting; I.iv That Plato is right about the logical distinction
between semantic tools and extensional objects; I.v That Plato is right
about the special kind of knowing involved in grasping or possessing concepts;
I.vi That Plato is right that searching for definitions is vacuous, and
that there are better ways to make philosophical progress, by using images
and icons; I.vii That Plato is not an opponent of images or illustrations;
I.viii That Plato is on sound ground speaking of the truth in representations
as derivative from a prior truth in the things
II. Where Do We Go From Here? 271
II.i About Plato’s Cratylus; II.ii About Plato’s Sophist; II.iii Conclusion:
that conceptual knowledge is irreducible and primitive
Bibliography 277
Index 287
Index Locorum 301
Acknowledgements
I received generous funding to support this research from the Leverhulme Trust and
the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as well as two semesters of research
leave from the University of East Anglia. The University of Aberdeen Philosophy
Department provided a visiting fellowship, excellent facilities, and collegial conversa-
tion in autumn 2008, and Merton College Oxford provided accommodation and colle-
gial facilities in autumn 2011. I would like to thank Gail Fine in particular for inviting
me to Merton, and for helpful conversations both then and at other stages of my
research. In 2009 Oxford Brookes University provided a ten-day visiting fellowship,
with accommodation and opportunities to present two seminar papers. On three
occasions I have enjoyed the hospitality of the Fondation Hardt in Geneva, with its
fine Classical library and other resources provided by the Geneva University libraries,
and the welcome opportunities to discuss ideas with other Classical scholars from
around Europe.
I have benefited from advice from three readers who reviewed sample chapters in
2010, and two readers who read the complete manuscript in 2012. I am especially
grateful to Sophie-Grace Chappell for comments on the manuscript at that stage.
I have tried, not always successfully, to pay proper heed to the excellent advice from all
these readers, and the manuscript has gone through several major revisions as a result.
I hope that it is now better, not worse.
I developed ideas from Chapters 1 and 2, and some work on the Sophist (not
included here in the end), in conversation with colleagues in Aberdeen (including
Patricia Clarke), in Cambridge (the D Society), and at Oxford Brookes University.
Chapters 3 and 4 contain material presented at Trinity College Dublin, the Nordic
Wittgenstein Society in Uppsala, and the Ancient Philosophy Workshop in Oxford.
Chapters 5 and 6 contain ideas discussed at the Southern Association for Ancient
Philosophy in Oxford, the Ancient Philosophy reading group in Cambridge, Oxford
Brookes University, the University of East Anglia, and the Open University. Chapters
7, 8, and 9 include material that I have presented in Toronto and in Bordeaux (the
Celtic Conference). At a reading of the Theaetetus in Dublin in 2013, I learned much
from discussion with Brendan O’Byrne, David Horan, and John Dillon, and from
Vasilis Politis, who had kindly invited me. I am also grateful to generations of under-
graduates at Swansea and the University of East Anglia (including my Special Subject
class of 2013) with whom I tried out several ideas.
“How can it be right to say that states will never end their troubles until philosophers
hold the sway in them, when we’ve agreed that the philosophers are useless to them?”
“Your question is one that needs to be answered by way of an icon,” I said.
“And you, of course, have never been known to talk through icons, I think!” said he.
“Bah! First you throw me an unfair topic, and then you mock the afflicted! But
here’s my icon . . . ”
Plato, Republic 487e (introducing the ship of state image)
PA RT I
Knowledge, Truth, and Belief
1
Knowledge, Conceptual
Knowledge, and the Iconic Route
to Grasping an Idea
I. In Which We Consider Whether ‘Knowledge’

Is an Important Topic in Plato’s Work
I.i That there is an irreducible form of knowledge that has to do with grasping
concepts and types or forms
Our task in this book is to address some questions concerning knowledge and truth.
Although the more familiar kinds of knowing that are usually discussed in modern
philosophy (such as ‘knowing that’) will occasionally feature in our enquiry, one particular
kind of ‘knowing’ will have a special place here: namely, having (grasping, knowing) a
concept or idea. For instance, if someone understands what makes a just thing count
as just, then (a) she has a concept of justice, (b) she has grasped what it is to be just, and
(c) she knows what justice is. In addition, (d) she may (though she need not) know
what the word ‘justice’ means, or she may (but need not) be able to use the term ‘just’
appropriately to describe things that she recognizes as just.
This kind of knowledge may come in degrees. For instance, it seems that one may
have a good or a hazy grasp of what it is to be just; and one may have an articulate or
inarticulate understanding of what justice is. But to have no idea at all what justice is,
or what the term ‘justice’ means, is to have a gap in one’s knowledge. Actually, those are
two different gaps; but anyway, there is a gap if one has no concept of the ‘just’ to apply
in the world.
For reasons that will become apparent, I shall often refer to such knowledge as
knowing ‘what it is’, which connects it with a certain notion of being that is expressed
by the term ‘is’ in ‘what it is’. Plato thinks of this kind of ‘knowing what it is’ as grasping
a certain kind of being, so that conceptual knowledge correlates with what we might
call conceptual being, as epistemic state to epistemic content. Given that the term being
has many other functions, it may seem that this is not a helpful way of understanding
the content of conceptual knowledge, but it leads us to identify a distinctive use of the
verb ‘be’ which does not reduce to any of the standard usages such as existence, predi-
cation, and so on. This is useful, because it is an important use of the verb ‘be’ and it
deserves attention.
4 Knowledge and Truth in Plato
Related to this kind of being is a corresponding idea of truth. We shall turn to

investigating the various kinds of truth, and their relation to being, in Chapter 2. There
we shall explore how ancient thinkers conceived of ‘truth’, how they linked it with
‘reality’ and ‘being’, and discover why they did not always, although they did sometimes,
regard truth as exclusively a property of propositional structures or representations.
Conceptual knowledge can be understood as grasping a kind of truth: when one
correctly grasps what justice is, one has in some sense grasped the truth about justice,
or what justice truly is. Such ‘truth’ tracks the notion of ‘being’ mentioned above, as the
content of a successful grasp of the relevant type, form, or concept. It is not to be under-
stood as the truth of some representation or proposition describing the idea, but it is
a truth in the idea itself, and is a mind-independent truth, out there to be grasped
whether anyone grasps it or not. By exploring this notion of truth we shall come to
recognize the advantages of thinking of truth as coming in degrees, where the standard
is set by reality—which has the highest degree of truth, in virtue of being what other
structures and signs merely portray, describe, or approximate.
I shall use Plato’s discussions as a route to raising and answering questions about this
kind of knowledge and this kind of truth. It seems to me that Plato has valuable things
to say on these matters. His treatment of them has been widely ignored, partly because
of a misreading (as I shall claim) of central aspects of his texts, including the question of
where in the text we find the views of the author. There are also certain preconceptions
in modern philosophy about what knowledge is, what it is of, and the form that conceptual
knowledge can take, which tend to exclude the options that Plato is recommending,
before we even begin, and this makes it hard for analytic philosophers to see that he
could be saying these things.
Furthermore, over the last fifty years we have seen a widespread desire to assimilate
different kinds of knowledge, or to reduce the less familiar kinds to some one funda-
mental kind of knowledge, either propositional knowledge or ‘knowledge how’. This,
I suggest, is not always helpful. Sometimes we need to look for differences, and take apart
things that have got unfairly lumped together or hammered into the wrong-shaped
hole. My proposal is that there is a kind of knowing that is more primitive than either
propositional knowledge or knowing how, which cannot be reduced to either of those;
and that Plato devoted much effort to exploring what form that knowing takes. His
work on this topic notes many reasons that count against trying to reduce conceptual
knowledge to one of the kinds of ‘knowing that’ or ‘knowing how’ which we tend to
treat as paradigmatic. Since knowing how and knowing that, as well as knowing who
or what, are all associated with recognizing a particular instance or token as falling under
a generic type, all these are actually parasitic upon the kind of knowing that Plato was
talking about. They presuppose and depend upon the generic conceptual knowledge.
Evidently, then, we cannot achieve clarity by trying to reduce the fundamental kind to
one of its derivative manifestations.
That this conceptual knowledge, or knowledge of types and forms, underpins all cases
of using it in propositions and practical engagement with the world is evident; what it is,
Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 5
and what it is about, and what kind of truth it captures is not so evident. These seem
to be questions to which Plato was perpetually drawn. It seems likely that he never
answered them to his satisfaction, but that his explorations in some of his most famous
dialogues are among the best treatments of the issues known to this day. They raise
virtually all the puzzles that a good solution would need to address. Indeed, if I am
right, there are no recent treatments that do justice to the exploratory proposals that
Plato is investigating here, partly because his proposals have not often been recognized
as a contribution to this field, and when they have, they have sometimes been ham-
mered into alignment with the reductionist projects of the present day. Some of his
proposals, such as the theory of ‘Forms’, even though they are not presented in Plato’s
own voice, and are not presented uncritically as a problem-free account or a finished
answer, do at least take seriously the desiderata and criteria for success for explaining
this knowledge: namely that we need the content of conceptual knowledge to be some-
thing that is rich with quasi-pictorial density and not reducible to a formula, definition,
or rule of thumb.
I.ii That Lyons’s ‘structural semantics’ approach to understanding

Plato’s term episteme needs to be superseded
Plato has a number of words for ‘knowledge’, both nouns and verbs, and various adjectives
for the person who knows. The noun episteme is perhaps the most important for our
purposes, since this is the one that (as I shall argue) sometimes serves as a technical
term for conceptual knowledge. It can also mean ‘science’, which is how I translate it in
Part IV, but as we shall see, Plato also holds that science, properly so-called, is a grasp of
generic truths. There are also other words for knowledge in Greek, many of which are
built on the gnosis root. These are etymologically related (via Latin and French) to English
words like ‘know’ and ‘cognition’ and ‘recognize’. Another set of knowledge words has
a root formed of eid, or oid, as in eidenai or oida. These are related to our words for
vision, via Latin videre, and we could compare our use of ‘I see’ to mean ‘I understand’
or ‘I get it’. All these words, both from the episteme root and from the oida or gignoskein
roots, are used to refer to knowledge or science, and all are contrasted with lesser kinds
of cognition in the discussions that Socrates has in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates particularly
contrasts all these sorts of knowing with having mere doxa (sometimes translated as ‘belief ’
or ‘opinion’), including doxa that is true/correct. Occasionally he contrasts knowledge
with perception (aisthesis), or with ignorance or dreaming or other conditions in which
one lacks access to truth and reality, either partially or altogether.
In a study of Plato’s terminology for ‘knowledge’, in the early 1960s, John Lyons
argued that the terms formed a structured system, in which each of the three verbs
(gignoskein, eidenai, and epistasthai) was paired with a corresponding noun (gnosis,
episteme, and techne respectively) and that because the semantics of each term is con-
textually nuanced by the implicit contrast with the other terms in the suite, there are
no easy word-for-word translations into English (which doesn’t have quite the same
suite of terms with the same implicit contrasts).1 In 1981, Lyons retracted his 1963
conclusions, and asserted that after all it is possible to align the triad of terms in Greek
quite successfully with analytic philosophy’s ‘troika’ of knowledge types (knowledge
that, knowledge how, and acquaintance).2 Myles Burnyeat had spent much of his early
career urging the importance of Lyons’s 1963 work, and particularly the mismatch
between episteme (paired with eidenai) and epistasthai (paired with techne), and
deploying the findings from Lyons’s Structural Semantics in his own studies of the
Theaetetus and other works. Recently Burnyeat has reiterated this continuing belief
in the 1963 work, and questioned whether Lyons should have retracted.3 It is true
that many of Burnyeat’s favourite observations survive the retraction, and I would
agree with Burnyeat that it is very unwise to treat analytic philosophy’s epistemic troika
as if it were a complete and definitive taxonomy of knowledge that is uniform across
cultures.4 Arguably my thesis in this book is that the troika omits the one that was
Plato’s most central case.
However, I think that there was something wrong with Lyons’s 1963 approach, which
has also infected much of Burnyeat’s work. It privileged a certain kind of contextual
semantics, and understood the semantics of a term to be fixed in all uses, but context-
ual in this sense: that the term’s meaning was determined by its relation to other terms
in the writer’s vocabulary (whose meaning was also fixed by that implicit contrast and
comparison). So the way to discover what a term means in Plato’s vocabulary was, on
that approach, a matter of discovering a consistent rule that identified which word is
invariably implying a contrast with which, and assigning a single constant meaning to
every word in every occurrence. What Lyons concedes (correctly) in his 1981 rethink
was that these words may have focal meanings (so that stereotypically, a certain term
tends to be used for a certain kind of knowing, even though others can also be used,
slightly outside their normal range). This is an improvement, though his attempt to align
the focal usages of the three terms with some modern focal senses of ‘know’ may be
seriously unhelpful, as we have observed. Burnyeat, by contrast, is still rather inclined
to the one-word one-meaning methodology, and to the attempt to use the supposedly
fixed structure of relations between these knowledge-terms to prescribe a meaning,
rather than looking to the immediate context in the text to see whether it is being used
in the way prescribed by the Lyons theory.
1
John Lyons, Structural Semantics: An analysis of part of the vocabulary of Plato (Oxford: Blackwell,
1963).
2
John Lyons, ‘Structural Semantics in retrospect’ in Thomas Edward Hope (ed.), Language, Meaning
and Style: Essays in memory of Stephen Ullmann (Leeds: Leeds University Press, 1981), 73–90.
3
Myles Burnyeat, ‘Episteme’ in Benjamin Morison and Katerina Ierodiakonou (eds.), Episteme, etc:
Essays in honour of Jonathan Barnes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–29, 12. See further below,
note 50.
4
As e.g. in Ronald Polansky, Philosophy and Knowledge: a commentary on Plato’s Theaetetus (Lewisburg,
PA: Bucknell University Press, 1992), 14 who claims that Plato’s Theaetetus covers (and succeeds with) all
known brands of knowledge. (Incidentally it is also odd to claim that it succeeds, given that every part of it
fails.) See Part IV below.
My view is that the structural semantics approach was wrong, and the cross-cultural
equations are very unwise. I also find that the meanings of the knowledge words are
largely determined by immediate context, and very much less by the built-in semantic
connotations of the chosen word. There are many contexts in which Plato freely substi-
tutes one knowledge word for another with gay abandon through a passage of text. We
shall find some such passages in later chapters.5 We shall also find places where Socrates
or his interlocutor assigns technical senses to words that had more flexible meanings
elsewhere,6 and many examples where Socrates stretches his terms, or even abuses their
conventional grammar, to raise new difficulties or make clearer distinctions where
ordinary language had not made any.7 To discover what Socrates means by a term, or
what work he is having it do in some place, one must read it carefully, in that context.
The fact that it means something different, or invokes a different contrast, in another
passage should never be invoked to undermine the most coherent reading of the target
passage. We can only discover whether there is a consistent meaning for any of Plato’s
terms by reading the text.
So I shall not take Lyons’s conclusions as gospel, neither his 1963 ones nor his 1981
ones; nor do I follow Burnyeat’s dependence on Lyons. It seems to me that Plato’s
language, and the Greek language in general, is as flexible as our own, and there are no
fixed constraints on how far one may stray from the focal meaning of a word, or on what
connotations or implicatures one may voluntarily cancel in any given context.
That said, I shall suggest that, very often, Plato uses the term episteme in a moderately
technical sense—perhaps a sense that he has newly invented, and for which he has
newly adapted an existing term. He uses it, I shall argue, specifically to denote a kind
of knowledge that is not part of our troika at all. Yet even if this is a novel usage, he
evidently thinks that this is what the term should mean: that exactly this knowledge
(the knowledge of Forms, of the what-it-is about our concepts) is what one needs to
count as wise, as having scientific understanding, as having the thing that qualifies as
episteme. He is setting episteme up as a standard, and prescribing what it is to reach
that standard. Some passages imply that the bar is high, since a lot of people seem to
fail to meet it, by turning out not to know what they thought they knew. Yet that is
not quite true in the end. It is only if you adopt the criterion that Socrates uses in the
‘Socratic’ bits of the dialogues for whether someone counts as knowing that those
people seem not to know. We shall find reason, repeatedly, to think that Plato the
author is challenging that criterion, and hence challenging the result: it turns out
that we know many things, and we have ways to discover yet more, once we discard
Socrates’ misguided demand that one who knows must be able to give a definition.
But more of that shortly.
5
See for example Chapter 3, note 21.
6
E.g. the redefinition of aisthesis and the introduction of a technical sense for doxazein at Theaetetus
186e1, 187a8 (see Chapter 11).
7
E.g. the novel grammar assigned to the term doxazein in the Theaetetus (see Chapter 11).
I.iii Whether ‘knowledge’ is a useful translation for Plato’s knowledge words

If Plato is talking about our grasp of types and forms when he writes about ‘knowing’ in
his technical sense, we might wonder whether ‘knowledge’ is a sensible word to use
in English. This is not one of the three paradigmatic kinds of knowledge recognized by
analytic philosophers. If conceptual knowledge cannot be reduced to one of the troika,
should we stop calling it ‘knowledge’? Does it perhaps go by another name? Or does it
have no name in English?
I think that we should agree with Plato that it is a kind of knowledge, that we do
speak of ‘knowing’ what a game is, or what justice is (as well as ‘understanding’, ‘grasping’,
‘learning’, and other similar terms, all of them epistemological). I also think that for us
too it is irreducible to any other kind of knowing. Plato seems to have thought that this
was the only kind of knowledge that could qualify as episteme. If we want to hold that
propositional knowledge is also a kind of knowing, then we shall not follow Plato in
that respect. But there is a case to be made for thinking that propositional knowledge
cannot occur without this kind of episteme. So it is the more basic kind, arguably.
The idea that Plato might mean something that is not exactly what we mean by
‘knowledge’ is not new. Myles Burnyeat sometimes claims that he means ‘understanding’.8
But this does not help much. Is ‘understanding’ a technical term with a precise defin-
ition in our epistemological taxonomy? If so, we run once more into the difficulty that
epistemic terms in Greek may not map well onto any of our epistemic terms; but this
was a point made by Burnyeat himself, both for and against Lyons.9 It can be turned
equally against Burnyeat himself, and anyone else who wants to say that episteme in
Plato means ‘understanding’, if that is meant to identify some technical epistemological
category; whereas if ‘understanding’ is not a technical term, it cannot help us to pinpoint
Plato’s meaning.
For Burnyeat the ‘understanding’ in question seems to be understanding why some
fact is true. He seems to mean that one has episteme when one grasps not just the fact
but also the explanation or justification for it. Then one knows the fact, because it is
‘understood’. This seems to be a variant of propositional knowledge (we still know that p),
with a further requirement about the way in which the propositional truth is grasped
(with or without a grasp of the reason why). Some might say that this is already built into
the idea of propositional knowledge (since knowledge includes something more than
just believing the true proposition). Surely for many Anglophone analytic philosophers,
understanding why might be integral to any knowing that p (as contrasted with thinking
8
See Myles Burnyeat, ‘Socrates and the Jury: paradoxes in Plato’s distinction between knowledge and
true belief ’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 54 (1980), 173–91, 186–8;
Myles Burnyeat, ‘Aristotle on understanding knowledge’ in Enrico Berti (ed.), Aristotle on Science: the
posterior analytics (Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium Aristotelicum; Padua: Ed. Antenore, 1981),
97–139, 133–6. See also J.M.E. Moravcsik, ‘Understanding and Knowledge in Plato’s Philosophy’, Neue
Hefte für Philosophie, 15/16 (1979), 53–69; Jon Moline, Plato’s Theory of Understanding (Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
9
Burnyeat, ‘Episteme’, 8–12. See this chapter, Section I.ii.
that p), whereupon adding understanding to the criteria does not seem to mark out
Plato’s idea as anything different from propositional knowledge, as currently under-
stood. Furthermore, if there is something further to know, besides the content of the
‘that . . . ’ clause—if we must also know or understand ‘why’, as Burnyeat implies—
should we take that additional knowledge ‘why’ to be knowledge of another fact—the
explanatory fact—or is it some other kind of knowledge from among the current troika
(some kind of know how or ‘knowledge-wh’, as the jargon has it)? If so, then we have not
escaped from matching Plato’s terms to contemporary analytic terms. Or is it some
additional kind of knowing that is not among those in the troika? In which case, we
want to know what it is and why it is sui generis and not reducible to one of those.
I dissent from the main thrust of Burnyeat’s proposal here, not so much because
I object to the term ‘understanding’ (since one could indeed use that term to mean
what I think Plato is talking about, though Burnyeat himself seems not to mean what
I mean).10 What I object to is (among other things) the inclusion of the factual knowledge
in the composite that Burnyeat has in mind, namely ‘knowing that p, plus understanding
why’. I disagree because I do not think that any kind of knowing facts or propositions is
ever included in episteme, as that term is used by Plato, whether or not you have some
further understanding of why they are true. Episteme just is not a knowledge of facts or
understanding of facts in the world. It is not knowledge that some particular state of
affairs obtains. Indeed, it does not relate to the particular at all.
However, I do take episteme to be a certain kind of understanding, namely conceptual
understanding—understanding a certain notion or idea, so as to be able to use it correctly
and explain it to someone else (as, for instance, in Wittgenstein’s famous example of
‘knowing what a game is’, and Socrates’ similar quest for knowing what a virtue is
or knowing what justice is).11 Clearly we can and do use the word ‘knowledge’ for this
(as Wittgenstein’s discussion, or rather the English translation of it, shows). We speak
of ‘knowing what a game is’, and of someone who doesn’t understand what games are as
‘not knowing’. It is a mistake to think that our term ‘knowledge’ means just knowledge
of facts, or ‘knowing that . . . ’, or that anything that deserves the name must be reducible
to something of that kind.12
Hence I remain sympathetic to some aspects of Burnyeat’s 2011 paper, in particular
his insistence that we should not come with some ready-made system of ‘kinds of
knowledge’ and see if Plato has got it right, but rather should invite analytic philosophers
10
The term ‘understanding’ is used as a translation for verstehen in Wittgenstein (e.g. Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophische Untersuchungen, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), §146) (henceforth PI).
The example is understanding how to continue a mathematical series, and belongs to a discussion of
rule-following as a way of thinking about conceptual knowledge. This is a text about the kind of knowledge
I have in mind (but it is not the only kind that can be called ‘understanding’). Arguably Wittgenstein was
inclined to reduce it to ‘knowing how’, a knowledge manifested in behaviour with no remainder.
11
See Chapter 4, and Catherine Rowett, ‘Plato, Wittgenstein and the definition of games’ in Luigi
Perissinotto and Begonia Ramon Camara (eds.), Wittgenstein and Plato (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), 196–219.
12
See further this chapter, Section IV.
to be challenged by something that does not fit their categories. I also concur with his
sense that knowledge of the Forms is not correctly captured in terms of ‘knowledge by
acquaintance’, as traditionally conceived. I disagree with him mainly for the straitjacket
from semantics that he uses to constrain the philosophical sense. I prefer to explore
threads of topic-based enquiries across the Platonic texts and draw conclusions about
the semantics from the philosophical results. I also disagree with some of Burnyeat’s
conclusions about knowing ‘what it is’, because he seems to think that what is known
in, say, ‘knowing the good, what it is’ is the answer to an indirect question, conceived as
a proposition.13
I.iv That knowledge is not a species of (propositional) belief, and that

Plato does not mean ‘belief ’ when he speaks of doxa
It has been customary for at least fifty years to classify knowledge as a kind of belief.
Hence any part of Plato’s work that relates to belief can superficially appear to be relevant
to epistemology, because it may bear on the familiar questions that appear in contem-
porary epistemology about true belief, error, misdescription, and so on, which go with
‘true belief ’ theories of propositional knowledge.
However, there are two reasons for resisting this approach. First, we must ask whether
any of Plato’s work is actually concerned with belief. The answer is not as clear as we
might have imagined. I shall argue that what Plato calls doxa should not be assimilated
to propositional belief because it lacks the propositional form.14 Translating doxa as
‘belief ’ has led many to assume, mistakenly in my view, that Plato was thinking about
knowledge as a kind of true belief, even though, as I shall argue, the nearest thing to
our notion of propositional knowledge of facts will be found in perception and doxa
(which are concerned with recognizing particular features in the world as tokens of a
certain type).15
On my view, the knowledge that Plato calls episteme does not include propositional
beliefs or any other kind of beliefs as any component. Beliefs will not count as knowledge
at all, but should be contrasted with knowledge, as a different kind of epistemic state
altogether. Perhaps we should be pleased, and happily stop the twentieth-century project
of pushing Plato into the ‘justified-true-belief box’, since arguably that box is already
falling to pieces. It may be better not to insist that Plato’s reflections on true belief
(if such there be) were intended as serious efforts towards an account of knowledge.
Perhaps, rather, they might be well targeted to show up the difference between belief
and knowledge. Such a conclusion would be welcome to those impressed by recent
‘knowledge first’ contributions such as that of Timothy Williamson.16 Even supposing
(as I do not) that Plato’s discussions are indeed about what we mean by belief, still they
13
Burnyeat, ‘Episteme’, 7.
14
See especially Chapters 5, 11, and 12. On the relation between beliefs and credence (for which Plato’s
term is pistis), see Chapter 2, Section I.ii.
15
See Chapters 5 and 12.
16
Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
need not be attempts at a successful compositional analysis of knowledge (as true belief
plus something). They may be showing that such an analysis would be unsuccessful.
This is the line taken by Lloyd Gerson in recent work.17
II. In Which We Classify Twentieth-Century

Interpretations of Plato’s Epistemology Into Roughly
Three Distinct Views, and I Place My View in This
Taxonomy (or Outside It)
II.i That there are two classic ways of understanding the relation
between Plato’s Middle and Later dialogues, one unitarian and one
developmental, and a third way that is also unitarian
In mainstream work on Plato since the early twentieth century,18 three ways of reading
Plato as an epistemologist can be seen emerging, all of which can be understood as
responses to developments in analytic philosophy, and to various kinds of pragmatism
and anti-realism that were fashionable at the time. If we suppose that truth is a prop-
erty of propositions, not things, and that knowledge is a propositional attitude, and
that propositions are perhaps true in virtue of their coherence rather than their relation
to a mind-independent world, and if we suppose that the world is inaccessible to thought
except through language, or is in some sense constructed in language, then knowledge
takes on a kind of linguistic character. Since Plato had traditionally been read as a realist,
and his account of knowledge in the so-called ‘Middle-Period’ dialogues seemed to focus
on knowledge of things, or perhaps a special range of things (i.e. Forms), not knowledge
of propositions couched in language, Plato suddenly looked deeply unfashionable.
Scholars then devised various ways to defend him, which I here call the Metaphysical,
Rylean, and Fine Readings.19
II.i.i The Metaphysical Reading

One way of saving Plato from being consigned to the heap marked ‘historic failures’
was to reject the above developments associated with twentieth-century analytic
philosophy, and to reassert, on Plato’s behalf, the need for realism, for the existence of a
mind-independent world that is the truth-maker, and the need for an account like
17
Especially Lloyd Gerson, Ancient Epistemology (Key Themes in Ancient Philosophy; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009). Cf. Lloyd Gerson, Knowing Persons: a study in Plato (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003).
18
By ‘mainstream’ I mean not including the tradition of Leo Strauss or the Tübingen School. On the
difference between my approach and that of the Straussians, see Section II.ii.
19
Timothy Chappell, Reading Plato’s Theaetetus (International Plato Studies; Sankt Augustin: Academia
Verlag, 2004), 16–21 gives a survey of this story as a choice of two models, unitarian or revisionist. He rightly
observes that the revisionist readings were motivated by charity, especially to address their antipathy to the
Forms. Naturally (though he does not explicitly say so), the unitarian readings, including his own, are also
motivated by charity.
Plato’s, to explain how we grasp truths that are not mere human constructs. For such
readers, Plato becomes the hero in a project to reassert Platonism as a genuine philosoph-
ical position with explanatory power. Readers who take this view argue that Plato’s
texts should be read as sophisticated explorations either of the advantages of Platonism,
or of the problems generated by alternative views (such as pragmatism, and coherence
theories of truth). This tends to go with what we call a ‘unitarian’ reading of Plato—that
is, claiming that Plato adhered to the same model of knowledge throughout his career,
and always maintained that the Forms exist in reality, as the paradigmatic objects
of knowledge.
On such a view, there is no suggestion that Plato went on to reject that realist model
of knowledge in the Later dialogues (since that would be to suppose that he abandoned
a good theory in favour of a less good one). Rather, it is assumed that the Later dialogues
develop the same position on epistemology and metaphysics as the Middle-Period
dialogues, though offering support for it in new and subtle ways. F.M. Cornford’s Plato’s
Theory of Knowledge is the classic example of such a reading.20
This way of reading Plato’s Later dialogues went out of fashion for much of the second
half of the twentieth century, but there is evidence of a trend towards rehabilitating it,
going back at least to the 1970s, in, for instance, the work of Nicholas White, and more
recently, Lloyd Gerson and Timothy Chappell in the first decade of the twenty-first
century.21
When this reading of Plato’s later epistemology is applied to the Theaetetus, especially
to the first part of that dialogue, it is often called ‘Reading A’, following Myles Burnyeat.22
I shall call it the Metaphysical Reading, because its chief object is to secure a realist
metaphysics, with transcendent Forms as the objects of knowledge.
II.i.ii The Rylean Reading

The second way to save Plato from the heap of historic failures is to concede that Plato
did indeed, in his younger days, toy with a realist model of knowledge, typified by
acquaintance with Forms, and that he once held a two-world view, which separated
knowledge from belief, as two faculties having access to two different sets of objects, but
that he later abandoned all this. This reading shares its interpretation of the so-called
‘Middle-Period’ dialogues with proponents of the Metaphysical Reading, but it differs
on what happens after that. On this view, we deduce that, sometime after writing the
20
Francis MacDonald Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1935). Also W.D. Ross, Plato’s Theory of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953); Harold Cherniss,
‘The relation of the Timaeus to Plato’s later dialogues’, American Journal of Philology, 78 (1957), 225–66.
21
Nicholas White, Plato on Knowledge and Reality (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976); Gerson, Ancient
Epistemology; Gerson, Knowing Persons; Chappell, Reading Plato’s Theaetetus. See also Constance
Meinwald’s comments in Constance Meinwald, ‘Good-bye to the Third Man’ in Richard Kraut (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 365–96, 390 regarding
the increasing dissatisfaction with the second model (described next).
22
Myles Burnyeat, The Theaetetus of Plato (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1990) presents two ways of reading
the Theaetetus as options for the reader to choose between, with his own commentary designed as a maieutic
tool asserting neither view.
Republic, Plato came to see faults in his earlier theories and revised them radically: the
revisions are already evident in the total absence of Forms from the Theaetetus, but further
improvements are identified even after the Theaetetus, particularly in the Sophist.
This developmental way of reading Plato was (perhaps not accidentally) prompted,
or at least encouraged, by Gilbert Ryle’s influential work which dreamed up a story
about Plato’s ‘progress’, according to which Plato came to realize that all his famous
‘theories’ from the Middle Period were muddled. Instead, he became a sound Rylean
in the Later Period.23 Readers who took this developmental line could adhere to the
dogmas of early twentieth-century analytic philosophy and still hold Plato up as a
great thinker, because they found that Plato himself had been wise enough (in his
maturity) to abandon the realist structures that he had foolishly proposed in his youth,
and adopt the dogmas of contemporary analytic philosophy instead.
It is often said that Ryle’s work on Plato was not very influential.24 It is true that some
of its detailed speculations were treated with suspicion, but his way of explaining
Plato’s development has become deeply entrenched in all subsequent work. What may
be closer to the truth is that Ryle’s approach was already in circulation by way of his oral
teaching, long before the publication of the 1966 book, so the effect of his published
book was less than the very extensive effect of his approach. Developmental readings
of this Rylean kind were pretty ubiquitous throughout the middle and latter part of
the twentieth century (again being somewhat challenged by more recent work from
various quarters).
On this developmental story, Plato’s thinking in the Later dialogues, such as the
Theaetetus and Sophist, is supposed to be fully compatible with the idea that knowledge
takes propositions as its content, that truth is a property of propositions, that the world is
structured by language, and that there is no need for disembodied souls or non-linguistic
access to reality. Readers in this tradition find in the Theaetetus the idea that there can be
knowledge of sensible particulars, not just Forms; the idea that truth involves complex-
ity, in particular the predication of one thing of another, and always has propositional
form; that knowledge, if it is of the truth, will also have propositional form; that one
might try to define knowledge as a kind of true belief, rather than radically alien from
belief (as in Middle-Period Plato); that logical atomism is an attractive but ultimately
self-defeating account of how knowledge and meaning are grounded; and that there is no
need for pre-existent souls, or out-of-body experience, since the mind can be stocked
with materials during its everyday embodied experience among particulars.
This second way of defending Plato seems to have been the dominant tradition since
at least the 1970s,25 and can be found in the work of Myles Burnyeat,26 David Bostock,
23
Gilbert Ryle, Plato’s Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966).
24
But see Myles Burnyeat, ‘Gilbert Ryle (1900–76)’ in Robert B. Todd (ed.), Dictionary of British
Classicists (3; Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), 846–9.
25
It was clearly motivating some of Gwynneth Matthews, Plato’s Epistemology and Related Logical Problems
(London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 13–23, who struggles with it somewhat in passages where she recognizes that
Plato is not speaking of knowledge of singular propositions, but of kinds or the complex relations of kinds.
26
Burnyeat, Theaetetus and many preceding articles.
David Sedley (with qualifications),27 and perhaps G.E.L. Owen.28 When applied to the
Theaetetus, this way of understanding Plato’s later epistemology is called ‘Reading B’ by
Burnyeat.29 I call it the Rylean Reading because it sees Plato as progressing away from
answers that appeal to metaphysics towards answers provided by the philosophy of
language, and because it finds in later Plato an embryonic awareness of what Ryle took
to be truths discovered by early analytic philosophy in the wake of Frege, Russell, and
Wittgenstein.
II.i.iii The Fine Reading

A third way to defend Plato, in the light of these worries about his unfashionable real-
ism, is to suggest that he was never a Platonist in the classic sense at all: that he never
had an acquaintance model of knowledge, never posited special Forms that could be
known, did not have what has been called a two-world view, and that he always, even in
his Early and Middle dialogues, related the capacities that he would call knowledge
to the ability to produce the propositions that go with such competence: that is, that
knowledge always took a proposition or logos as content. This line is taken by (among
others) Gail Fine. She maintains that Plato always held that knowledge was a form of
true belief, and that, throughout the dialogues, what makes knowledge ‘true’ is a kind
of holistic coherence, not a realism of the sort that most readers have found in the
Middle dialogues.
This third view is unitarian: there is no need for a story of development or change.
But it secures the unity of Plato’s work by reading back what the Rylean readers saw
in the Later dialogues, and finding it already there in the Meno, Republic, and so on.30
I shall call this view the Fine Reading, because Fine has been its most prominent and
determined exponent.
27
David Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism: text and subtext in Plato’s Theaetetus (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2004); David Bostock, Plato’s Theaetetus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Sedley thinks that Plato
saw himself as continuing the same project throughout (Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 13–15).
However, he thinks that Plato endorsed the Socratic approach in his early work, and that in the Theaetetus
the text serves as midwife, to deliver a Platonic brainchild that Socrates himself could not conceive, which
allows the text to elicit from the reader an answer not explicitly offered by Socrates, which is Plato’s answer.
So although he finds continuity between the Socratic (pre-Forms) project and the Platonic one, Sedley is
closer to the Rylean reading on the issue of whether there is ‘progress’ towards an ‘improved’ understanding
of the propositional structure of thought and knowledge, and towards the ‘correct’ diagnosis of false belief
as propositional. Like Frede, Sedley considers that some puzzles are still inadequately addressed in the
Theaetetus, and that Plato finds a correct solution in the Sophist (Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 119).
28
G.E.L. Owen, ‘Plato on not-being’ in Gregory Vlastos (ed.), Plato I: metaphysics and epistemology
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), 223–67 does not much discuss the Theaetetus, but seems to think it
still fairly benighted, though perhaps only about the relation between reference and meaning in sentences
(see Owen, ‘Plato on not-being’, 245).
29
See note 22. Burnyeat’s two options are not entirely satisfactory: see, for instance, some criticisms in
Lesley Brown, ‘Understanding the Theaetetus’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 11 (1994), 199–224,
209–13.
30
See particularly Fine’s articles collected in her volume of reprints, Gail Fine, Plato on Knowledge and
Forms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).
II.ii Some further options

The three stories just mentioned are the main options represented in the literature
addressing Plato’s later epistemology. Either Plato did, or he did not, hold various realist
doctrines in what we call his Middle Period, such as the idea that knowledge is funda-
mentally different from belief, that particulars cannot be known, that knowledge cannot
be acquired from empirical experience, that there is a metaphysical realm of stable
objects that can be known, that truth and knowability are properties of permanent
unchanging Forms that have their own characteristics to the nth degree, and so on.
If Plato did not hold those views at all, he was never a confused metaphysician and
there is no charge to answer; so there is no need to invoke any change of mind. That is
how the Fine Reading solves the problem. If Plato did hold those views in the Middle
Period then either he was or was not right to do so. Then either he did or did not give
them up in the Later Period, supposing that the Theaetetus, and especially the Sophist,
were written later. If he was wrong to hold those views, then he was right to give them
up, and should be congratulated. This is how the Rylean Reading solves the problem.
If Plato was right to hold the realist views, then it is not likely that he gave them up.
Rather it is preferable to read the supposedly Later dialogues on the basis that he main-
tained those views to the end. We must then choose between supposing that the Later
dialogues explicitly defend Platonism, or that they implicitly encourage Platonism as the
only position that can survive the difficulties raised in those dialogues. These variants
belong to the Metaphysical Reading. Metaphysical Readers can hold either that the Later
dialogues present problems on which any non-realist ontology and epistemology will
evidently founder, or that the Later dialogues continue to reveal, directly, that the
Platonist ontology and epistemology survive unscathed.
Besides these, there are two other positions that do not fit entirely comfortably
with the scheme just sketched. One is represented by Michael Frede, the other by
John McDowell. Michael Frede was concerned mainly with Plato’s Sophist, especially
its work on negation of the verb ‘be’. Although he did not develop its implications with
respect to knowledge,31 it appears that he was a developmentalist. He thinks that the
Sophist still implies that there is a kind of Being that belongs only to Forms, but that
Plato had by then rejected some extreme versions of self-predication that were confusing
him in the Middle Period. He also seems to think that, in the Theaetetus, Plato has real-
ized that belief must be propositional, and distinct from perception.32 In these respects
Frede comes close to the Rylean position that we find in Burnyeat and Bostock. However,
31
His work on the Sophist is mainly contained in an early work, Michael Frede, Prädikation und
Existenzaussage (Hypomnemata, 18; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967), together with a
more accessible article from later in his life, Michael Frede, ‘Plato’s Sophist on false statements’ in
Richard Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
397–424. Michael Frede, ‘Observations on perception in Plato’s later dialogues’, Essays in Ancient Philosophy
(Mineapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–8 includes a very sketchy discussion of perception
and belief in the Theaetetus.
32
Frede, ‘Observations on Perception’.
he still has Plato saying some unfashionable things about perception and metaphysics,
retaining Forms in the late period, and invoking a special ‘itself in itself ’ use of the verb
‘be’ for saying what the Form is in itself, and in other ways seeks to show how alien the
material is, even in the late dialogues, to our way of thinking and to the distinctions
between senses of ‘to be’ so beloved of analytic interpreters. This alienating ambition
aligns him with the Metaphysical party, who would maintain that we ought to learn
from Plato’s unfashionable and challenging ways of addressing his problems. Some
of Frede’s thoughts, and his alienating ambitions, are quite close to what I am arguing
for here.
John McDowell is also slightly hard to place in my scheme. This is partly because
his major work on the subject is a commentary on the Theaetetus which lacks any
introduction or extended essay on any of the issues, so his overall view is hard to extract
from his intermittent comments on problematic passages. His position is evidently
something like the Rylean one, in that he thinks that Plato makes progress, and that the
later works abandon certain ways of thinking that were characteristic of Middle dialogues.
Parts of his commentary imply that Plato was (by now) equating truth and being with
propositional structure, and he thinks that Theaetetus 184–6 delivers a sense-datum
theory for perception; also he thinks that the arguments and distinctions that Plato
musters in discussing whether knowledge might be defined as true judgement ought
to have committed Plato to a propositional or quasi-propositional structure for know-
ledge if Plato had been sufficiently clear about what he was doing.33 Yet at the same
time, he emphasizes at relevant points that Plato thinks of his topic as ‘knowledge of
things’,34 concluding that Plato was at least somewhat confused by this, and by failing
to realize that ‘to know something as the thing it is’ should be unpacked as an answer to
an indirect question, amounting to knowing what it is, and should therefore be couched
as knowledge that . . . ,35 McDowell reckons that Plato still needs to make further progress
(which he does in the Sophist), and that he is still some way from reaching clarity on
these issues in the Theaetetus.
So McDowell, like Frede, recognizes that Plato still does things that are alien to modern
sensibilities, even in his relatively mature works, but McDowell does not commend
these strange ways of thinking, but supposes that it is a stage on the way to less non-
sensical talk. By the end of the Sophist, Plato will be close to talking as we (post-Fregean
philosophers of language) would expect him to talk. Evidently then, McDowell, like Frede,
favours the Rylean Reading, but thinks that the progress to clarity is still incomplete
in the Theaetetus.
Aside from these mainstream interpretations, we should also mention Straussian
readings, which suggest that Plato’s dialogues have one message at the exoteric level,
33
John McDowell, Plato’s Theaetetus (Clarendon Plato; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), particularly
118 and 192.
34
McDowell, Theaetetus, 115, 192. He also notes the direct object construction for doxazein, on which
see Chapter 11, Section I.
35
See Chapter 11, note 8.
for a superficial reading of the text, and another hidden meaning for those in the
know. Unlike Sedley’s maieutic reading of the Theaetetus (which also uses a distinction
between surface meaning and philosophical message) and those Metaphysical readers
(e.g. Cornford) who think that Plato is nudging us to supply the Forms where they are
not mentioned, the Straussian tradition looks for political or social reasons, not liter-
ary or pedagogical ones, for why Plato must hide his meaning. It also looks for political
or social importance, not philosophical significance, in what is hidden. In what follows,
I shall often suggest that by reading some portion of text closely we can discover that
the discussion fails in what it overtly sets out to do, for reasons that the reader can see,
while the characters in the dialogue cannot see it, because those characters are missing
something important—something that Plato the author wants the reader to bring to
bear. In such cases there is a hidden message that is not stated in the text, but it is a
philosophical message, about how to escape an impasse that the characters have
encountered. When I suggest such an authorial tactic, the idea is more like Sedley’s
maieutic reading,36 and Cornford’s Metaphysical Reading of the Theaetetus,37 and quite
unlike the Straussian approach.
II.iii That my interpretation is a variant of the first type

My own position does not coincide exactly with any of the approaches just sketched.
It is true that I share with McDowell the sense that Socrates really is talking about
something like knowing things in the Theaetetus, not ‘knowing that’.38 Whereas McDowell
thought that Plato was confused on that score, I disagree. I think that we need to take the
conversation in the Theaetetus, about discerning things and features, more seriously.
I think that the Theaetetus is not trying to talk about truth and falsity in propositions:
that is something else, for another dialogue. I do not think that the Sophist is trying to
revise Plato’s own treatment of an ongoing puzzle first addressed in the Theaetetus.39
On the contrary, the topic addressed in the Theaetetus (episteme) has been replaced by
a new topic (true and false sentences). It is our mistake if we cannot see that these two
topics are different.40
Certainly, on my view, some aspects of Plato’s work turn out to be alien and hard to
get our head around, if we come with preconceptions from early twentieth-century
analytic philosophy (though it is conceivable that these aspects might seem less alien
to those familiar with Wittgenstein’s later work, and parts of Kripke). I think that we
need to keep and respect what is alien in Plato’s work.41 I am attempting to read Plato’s
36
Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism. 37 Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge.
38
Not that one knows things on my view, but the faculties all take direct-object constructions. See further
Chapters 4 and 12.
39
Here I disagree with Sedley, The Midwife of Platonism, 119.
40
I cannot treat the Sophist in this volume, but see Chapter 13 for some thoughts.
41
I shall diagnose some peculiarities that are similar to what Frede found, especially his suggestions about
a special use of the verb ‘be’. See also Charles H. Kahn, ‘Some philosophical uses of “to be” in Plato’,
Phronesis, 26 (1981), 105–34 (reprinted in Charles H. Kahn, Essays on Being, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009, 75–108); R.E. Allen, ‘Participation and predication in Plato’s Middle Dialogues’ in Gregory
work, including the Theaetetus, without rewriting them to make knowledge or truth
propositional. However, I am not particularly concerned to make any of these works
(whether Middle or Late) defend the realist ontology that the Metaphysical Reading
found there. Rather, I share with Gail Fine the thought that the Platonist tradition
might not have the last word on what is going on, even in the Middle dialogues. The
continuity between the Middle and Late dialogues need not be a Platonism of exactly
the kind that has traditionally been attached to Plato’s name.
Still, I do not share Fine’s view of what we ought to find in Plato’s Middle Period. She
has a Rylean account of what knowledge should be, and suggests that we were wrong to
suppose that Plato ever had anything else. I, by contrast, want to suggest that we should
not have Plato end up there, with a Rylean view, even in the late period, and therefore, a
fortiori, not in the Middle or Early works either. In particular, I shall suggest that Plato
does indeed make a strong distinction between knowledge and opinion in both the
Middle and the Later dialogues, and he does not think, even in the Later dialogues,
that knowledge can be reduced to, or defined in terms of, belief, or opinion, or ‘seem-
ing’, plus something. I shall suggest that the traditional reading is right to link doxa
(seeming, discerning, opinion) with perception, and to think that Plato gives them both
the same status—that both fall short of knowledge because they are not accessing the
kind of content that can be known. In these respects I concur with the Metaphysical
Reading and dissent from much that Fine has to say.
On the other hand—and here I part company from the Metaphysical Reading—I do
not think that the distinction between knowledge and opinion entails a hard and fast
distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible world, or between Forms
and their instances, or between universals and particulars, or between being and
becoming. Certainly all these distinctions figure crucially in Plato’s thought, and inter-
sect in his discussions of both metaphysics and epistemology. But what falls on one
side of one of these divisions need not always fall on that side of the division, nor need
it always fall on that same side of the other divisions (if we imagine, for instance, that
we have laid these dualities out in a chart with two columns).
Here are two ways of thinking that things might be more complex than the traditional
‘two-world’ view of Plato’s distinction between Forms and Particulars. First we might
say that there are features (or attributes) and there are what the features belong to. An
individual case of justice can be regarded as a feature, or as a thing that has that feature.
In both cases the item is a particular that instantiates the generic form ‘justice’, but the
particular feature (a case of justice) is neither material, nor an object, although it is not
a Form.42 It is (or might be) abstract, but not generic. It is often unclear, when Plato
Vlastos (ed.), Plato: A collection of critical essays, Volume 1 (New York: Anchor Books, 1971), 167–83; Francisco
J. Gonzalez, ‘Propositions or objects? A critique of Gail Fine on knowledge and belief in Republic V’, Phronesis,
41 (1996), 245–75 (all questioning attempts to assimilate Plato’s uses of ‘is’ to the ‘is’ of predication).
42
It is what is known as a ‘trope’. See Peter Simons, ‘Particulars in particular clothing: three trope theor-
ies of substance’ in Stephen Laurence and Cynthia MacDonald (eds.), Contemporary Readings in the
Foundations of Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 364–84.
speaks of many just [things] or many beautiful [things], whether he is referring to

instances of justice (tropes) or objects that have justice as a property (concrete particu-
lars with properties). If ‘Justice’, the Form, is an abstract property shared by particular
things, it is not clear whether what shares in it are instances of the property (tropes),
or concrete particulars that have it as a property. If there is and could be only one
instance of a property, what is the distinction between the Form and the one instance
of that property? The logical distinction clearly remains, even though plurality is not
a characteristic of the set of instances of that property. And again, is it not the case
that a Form too can itself have features, which instantiate other Forms? Can it also
itself be (or manifest) a particular property-instance of another kind? For instance,
every Form instantiates the general types ‘Form’ and ‘intelligible object’. Are these also
Forms, or are there only Forms of features, not of types of objects, in which case Forms
will not themselves be particular instances of Form (nor will any things or objects), but
they will have, or manifest, property-instances that are the instances of other Forms
(such as unity, difference, and so on: the great kinds, if you like).
Second, we might say that there is a distinction between the intelligible or semantic
conceptual tools with which we interpret the world, and the non-semantic objects
or things that are described or thought about in those terms. To instantiate an idea or
concept is to be something of the kind in question, but it is minds, intelligent beings,
that think of them and describe them in those terms. So there are inanimate beings
that can be thought of, and there are the ideas that we use to think about them. But of
course animate beings can also be in the first category: indeed, they must be when we
think about them or classify them or describe them. Ideas are mental and descriptive,
but they can be descriptive of the minds that think them, and they can be descriptive of
other ideas. Semantics can refer to semantic items as well as to non-semantic ones. So
if we think of the intelligible (Forms, ideas) as semantic entities, and the application of
them being the work of a mind, and the instantiation of them being when something
qualifies to be seen or thought of in those terms, then the things that can qualify for
some term or description can include both semantic and non-semantic entities. There
is no impermeable division between the two worlds, except that material objects can-
not be ideas, or the bearers of meaning (though they can be used as symbols or signs to
stand for an idea that has meaning).
So whether we think of Forms as generic classes, with their instances being particular
members of the class, or as property types, with their instances being tropes or token
cases of the property, or as the archetypes of semantic or conceptual tools and descrip-
tors, with their instances being those objects that qualify for the description, there will
be no simple ontological structure in which everything that there is falls permanently
into one or other but not both of those worlds, even though the logical distinction
between the two is absolutely clear, no matter which understanding we take of what a
‘Form’ is.
For understanding what Plato is talking about, it may be better to consider not
what things or objects can be known (and what can’t)—as though the issue were
ontological—but rather what kind of question one can know the answer to. Sometimes
Plato talks of knowing being, or ‘what it is’, which is the answer to a question about the
being of something. Being and truth and knowledge are closely connected in Plato’s
thought, as we shall see. The issue then is what is meant by knowing ‘what it is’, and
about what kind of thing (or under what circumstances) one can ask and answer this
question. One reason for trying to talk about Forms, among things that we might
know, is not that they are some special kind of permanent or real object, but that they
are the very same features as we use among our tools for predication and description of
other things, but when they are looked at in themselves, as the features that they are, not
as the features of something else, then we can say something about them, and indeed
know them, and not just use them to describe the incidental features of other things, as
we do in predication. Similarly, we can ask of some concept or generic idea not ‘what
things fall under it’, but ‘what it is in itself ’, which means something like what makes
a thing count as one of those, or what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for
falling into this class.
The question about ‘what it is’ seeks not the extension of the class but the criteria for
membership. It tempts us to an essentialist view, the search for definitions that give the
one key criterion that makes all just things count as just, or whatever. But although that
search for a single criterion turns out to be simple-minded, and never yields results,43
that does not mean that we never do know ‘what it is’ about an idea such as justice, or
that we should not ask what kind of knowing that is.44
II.iv That the contrast between episteme and doxa is the contrast
between the grasp of types or concepts and the recognition
of tokens or instances
In this book, I shall test the hypothesis that Plato thinks of knowing as answering the
‘what it is’ question about things of this kind—that is, knowing a concept or type, not as
an instance of another kind (e.g. that virtue is a kind of knowledge) but as what it is in
itself (what virtue is, what justice is). By contrast, seeming or perceiving are the terms
for seeing or recognizing a particular under some description, such as when we observe
that Theaetetus is ugly or that virtue is teachable, or that Socrates is a man or that virtue
is a kind of knowledge. (I use ‘seeming’ here as a handy term for non-sensory appearances
or doxa, where something seems to be F, i.e. dokei.) These, when expressed in language,
typically involve a kind of predication, forming a proposition to the effect that x is an F
(virtue is knowledge, for instance), but epistemically they typically consist in x seem-
ing F to A, or A perceiving x as F—or, as Socrates will more often say, A perceiving an F,
43
I simplify. It cannot yield results for the values that Socrates investigates.
44
For relevant reflections on knowing ‘what justice is’, as manifested in practice and not a definition,
see A.W. Price, Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 178 and
note 28.
or perceiving the Fness of x.45 They involve applying a semantic idea or Form (such as
virtue) to an extensional particular (a particular virtue), even if that particular might
itself also be (on other occasions) itself a type (e.g. courage) that could have instances
or tokens of its own.46
This distinction between knowing Fness for what it is and seeing Fness as an instance
or example of some other kind or property G cuts across the divide between Forms and
particulars as traditionally conceived, since forming propositions about Forms or types
would then be a case of predication—and therefore a case of seeming, not knowing. It
might then seem that discovering, about a mere particular, what that thing is in itself,
would amount to knowing. But in fact it will not make sense to ask the ‘what is it’ ques-
tion about a particular, since knowing ‘what it is in itself ’ means knowing what makes
something count as one of those, and that is something that could only apply to something
that is generic, conceptual, or semantic—to a type or role, not to its token or occupant.
This helps us to see why Plato would want to say that the particular (qua particular)
cannot be known and is subject to becoming but not being.47
All of this runs completely counter to the pressure from some branches of analytic
philosophy to think that Plato was on his way to realizing (after some earlier confusion)
that ‘being’ and truth have something to do with predication, with structures of the
‘x is F’ sort, and hence that knowledge too should be propositional in structure. On the
contrary, I shall argue, Plato always assigns judgements about particular facts and tokens
to seeming, and even when true such judgements are no more than true seeming.
They fail to meet his criteria for being knowledge or science (episteme), not because
they are not truth-apt, but because the recognition that some x is F is the wrong kind of
content for episteme. In this book we shall look closely at some passages in both the
Meno and the Theaetetus that have been read as hints that predications of the ‘x is F’
kind might be serious candidates for being knowledge. I hope to show that Plato thinks
precisely the opposite.
Suppose I am right about what Plato is talking about, and he is right about the peculiar
nature of this knowledge. Should we then confine the word ‘know’ to this restricted range
of knowledge, as Plato confines his knowledge-terms to knowing what it is about a type
or form? Clearly not. On the contrary, knowledge will continue to mean what it ordinarily
means. Our vocabulary does not precisely fit Plato’s, and arguably Plato has tried to
impose an artificial restriction on how his Greek words can be used. He seems, on strict
days, to reserve episteme words for just one part of the knowledge spectrum. But his
usage can serve as a wake-up call to us. What Plato calls episteme is also something that
we would call ‘knowledge’, but arguably it does not occupy a sufficiently central place in
45
See Chapter 11, notes 12 and 52.
46
Again, see Price, Virtue and Reason in Plato and Aristotle, 178, 180–7.
47
For some discussion of this, see Chapters 4 and 5. The idea that the particular does not have being
of its own, but only becoming, is found more in the Timaeus and Sophist than in the dialogues we shall
discuss here.
our epistemological reflections, though it does have an established place in work on

the philosophy of language.48
In addition, since Plato does not use any of his several terms for ‘knowing’ to refer
to practices that we call propositional knowledge—or, at least, even if he uses knowledge
words occasionally of such practices, in non-specialist contexts,49 he seems to avoid
doing so when he is doing careful epistemology, and tends, instead, to deny that such
propositional thoughts can be knowledge—this too can prompt to us to rethink, to
wonder why we have focused so centrally on knowledge of facts, or even what leads
us to suppose that it is a kind of knowledge at all, let alone the most important
kind. Plato, when he is doing epistemology, does not consider that it qualifies for any
dignified name.50
Nevertheless, we need not immediately exclude what Plato excludes just because he
excludes it and has reasons for doing so that are worthy of attention. Rather, perhaps,
we should extend our attention to include what he includes as another important kind
of knowing. We might agree that it would help to have two different words, one for
‘knowing what the F is’ about a concept or descriptor and another for knowing about
something in the realm of particulars that qualifies for that description. We need
something like the distinction that John McDowell makes (following but dissenting
somewhat from Wilfrid Sellars) between a space of reasons and a space of natural laws.
In our case it is something like a distinction between the space of concepts or semantic
ideas, and a space where there are non-semantic facts to which those semantic ideas
can be rightly or wrongly applied. And then we need a distinction between the kind
of knowledge that is an understanding of items in the first space, and the kind of
knowledge that is a grasp of facts in the second space (which is logically dependent
on the former kind).
By alerting us to what mainstream epistemology has largely missed, but philosophy
of language has embraced, Plato prompts us to think about the conditions for know-
ledge in both realms. He prompts us to ask whether our traditional project to define
‘knowledge’ fails not just because it ignores the polysemy of the term ‘know’, but also
because ‘knowing that’ presupposes, and is parasitic upon, another more fundamental
kind of knowledge, which is knowledge of items in the space of concepts (what we
might call the intelligible world), which we had stopped noticing when we stopped
understanding Plato. What we actually need is the distinction between the intelligible
48
The topic of what it is to be a competent user of a concept tends to fall under philosophy of language,
meaning, or logic for us, rather than epistemology: e.g. Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell,
1980); Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). See further
below (note 59, and Chapter 4).
49
E.g. in Protagoras 355d, 358b he discusses whether I can ‘know that something is bad’ and still do it
(I thank Michael Morris for raising these examples in debate). There is controversy over whether Socrates
claims to know ‘that he knows nothing’, but arguably he does not (see discussion in Gail Fine, ‘Does
Socrates claim to know that he knows nothing?’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 35 (2008), 49–88).
50
See Section I.ii.
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Cerebral arteries, atheroma, v. 991
meningeal hemorrhage, v. 710
paralysis, v. 917
veins and sinuses, thrombosis of, v. 982
vessels, occlusion of, v. 917, 946
Cervical sympathetic, diseases of, v. 1263
Cestodes or tape-worms, ii. 931
Chloasma, iv. 659

Chloral habit, the, v. 660
Chloroform, habitual addiction to, v. 667
Chlorosis, iii. 894
Cholera, i. 715
infantum, ii. 741
morbus, ii. 719
Chorea, v. 439
of the larynx, iii. 76
Chromidrosis, iv. 585
Chyluria, iv. 114
Cimex lectularius, iv. 733
Circulatory System, Diseases of, iii. 599
Clavus, iv. 663
Cocaine, habitual addiction to, v. 667

Cœliac axis, diseases of, iii. 841
Colic, hepatic, ii. 1058
intestinal, ii. 658
renal, iv. 42
Coma, v. 26, 382
Comedo, iv. 589
Constipation, ii. 638, 650

Convulsive disorders, local, v. 461
Copodyscinesia, v. 504
Corns, iv. 663
Cornu cutaneum, iv. 663
Coronary artery, diseases of, iii. 828
Coryza, iii. 41
Cough, nervous, iii. 71

Cranio-cerebral topography, v. 93
Cretinism, v. 138
Croup, spasmodic or false, iii. 70, 92
true, iii. 100
Culex, iv. 733
Cyanosis and Congenital Anomalies of Heart and Great Vessels, iii.

687, 712
Cysticercus cellulosæ, iv. 732

Cystitis, acute and chronic, iv. 126, 128
in women, iv. 341
D.
Deaf-mutism, iv. 840
Deafness after cerebro-spinal meningitis, mumps, scarlet fever, etc.,

iv. 839
Death, apparent, v. 385
Degenerations, i. 72
Dementia, v. 164
Demodex folliculorum, iv. 732
Dengue, i. 879
Dentition, morbid, ii. 371
Dermatalgia, iv. 711
Dermatitis, iv. 600, 604, 611, 623
Dermatolysis, iv. 675

Dermoid cyst of the ovary, iv. 299
Diabetes insipidus, iv. 27
Mellitus, ii. 195
Diagnosis, general, i. 148
Digestive System, Diseases of, ii. 319
Diphtheria, i. 656
Disease, causes and prevention of, i. 175

Diseases, General, i. 229
Distomum hepaticum, ii. 1109
Drainage and Sewerage in their Hygienic Relations, i. 213
Dreams, v. 368
Ductus communis choledochus, occlusion of, ii. 1082
Dura mater, cerebral, congestion of, v. 704

Dysentery, ii. 777
Dyslalia, v. 571
Dysmenorrhœa, iv. 192
Dyspepsia, functional and atonic, ii. 436
E.
Ear, internal, diseases of, iv. 835
middle, diseases of, iv. 817

Echinococcus of the liver, ii. 1101
Eclampsia, v. 464
Ecstasy, v. 339
Ecthyma, iv. 653
Eczema, iv. 625
marginatum, iv. 718
Effusions, i. 67
Elephantiasis, iv. 675
Embolism and Thrombosis, i. 56
of the spinal cord, v. 808
capillary, cerebral, v. 979
Emphysema, iii. 233, 249
Endocarditis, iii. 639, 640, 642, 643
Endometritis, acute and chronic, iv. 460, 462
Enteralgia, ii. 658

Enteritis, Pseudo-membranous, ii. 763
Entero-colitis, ii. 726
Epilepsy, v. 468
Epiglottis, inflammation and erosion of, iii. 109
Epithelioma, iv. 707
Epistaxis, iii. 50
Erythema, iv. 593, 595, 596
Erysipelas, i. 629
Ether, habitual addiction to, v. 667
Etiology, general, i. 125
Eye affections, from diseases of the digestive organs, iv. 749
diseases of the kidneys and skin, iv. 752
general system, iv. 800
nervous system, iv. 771, 796, 797, 799

respiratory organs, iv. 748
sexual organs, iv. 755
spinal cord, iv. 792
mental affections, iv. 791
Eye-ground and appendages, changes in, from diseases of the

circulatory apparatus, iv. 738
F.
Facial atrophy, progressive unilateral, v. 694
nerve, peripheral paralysis of, v. 1202
spasm, painless, v. 462

Fallopian tubes, dropsy of, iv. 295
Farcy, i. 909
Favus, iv. 715
Fibroma, iv. 686
Filaria medinensis, iv. 732
Fistulo in ano, ii. 897

Flea, common, iv. 733
Flea, sand-, iv. 732
Fluke-worms, iii. 946
Furunculus, iv. 604
of external auditory canal, iv. 813
of labia, iv. 362
G.
Gad-fly, iv. 732

Gall-stones, ii. 1058
Gangrene, symmetrical, v. 1257
Gastralgia, ii. 459, v. 1238
Gastric catarrh, acute and chronic, ii. 463, 470
Gastritis, acute and chronic, ii. 463, 470
Gastromalacia, ii. 618

Gastrorrhagia, ii, 580
Genito-urinary System, Diseases of, iv. 17
Glanders, i. 909
Glossanthrax, ii. 368
Glossitis, acute, ii. 354-366
chronic, ii. 366-368
Glottis, œdema of, iii. 112
spasm of, in adults, iii. 74

Knowledge and Truth in Plato Stepping Past The Shadow of Socrates Catherine Rowett Full Chapter

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Knowledge and Truth in Plato: Stepping

Past the Shadow of Socrates Catherine

Knowledge and Truth in Plato

I. About the Reader’s Views on Plato

II. What I Am Trying to Do in This Book

III. How to Read This Book

IV. Numbering System for Quoted Texts

Part I. Knowledge, Truth, and Belief

2. Truth and Belief 34

Part II. Plato’s Meno

indefinable side of the double square, is intended to prove that what

Part III. Plato’s Republic

relation, of icon to original, characterizes the higher levels of the Divided

Part IV. Plato’s Theaetetus

an earlier mistake or inventing a unified consciousness); III.iv That the

III. In Which We Examine Why Socrates Concludes the Examination of

Part V. The Bigger Picture

I. In Which We Consider Whether ‘Knowledge’

4 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Related to this kind of being is a corresponding idea of truth. We shall turn to

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 5

I.ii That Lyons’s ‘structural semantics’ approach to understanding

6 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 7

8 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

I.iii Whether ‘knowledge’ is a useful translation for Plato’s knowledge words

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 9

10 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

I.iv That knowledge is not a species of (propositional) belief, and that

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 11

II. In Which We Classify Twentieth-Century

II.i.i The Metaphysical Reading

12 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

II.i.ii The Rylean Reading

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 13

14 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

II.i.iii The Fine Reading

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 15

II.ii Some further options

16 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 17

II.iii That my interpretation is a variant of the first type

18 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 19

speaks of many just [things] or many beautiful [things], whether he is referring to

20 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

Knowledge, Conceptual Knowledge, and the Iconic Route 21

22 Knowledge and Truth in Plato

our epistemological reflections, though it does have an established place in work on

meningeal hemorrhage, v. 710

veins and sinuses, thrombosis of, v. 982

vessels, occlusion of, v. 917, 946

Cervical sympathetic, diseases of, v. 1263

Cestodes or tape-worms, ii. 931

Chloasma, iv. 659

Chloroform, habitual addiction to, v. 667

Chlorosis, iii. 894

infantum, ii. 741

morbus, ii. 719

Chromidrosis, iv. 585

Chyluria, iv. 114

Cimex lectularius, iv. 733

Circulatory System, Diseases of, iii. 599

2. Truth and Belief 34