identity and infallibility in plato's epistemology

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Identity and Infallibility in Plato's EpistemologyAuthor(s): Travis ButlerSource: Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science, Vol. 39, No. 1 (March 2006),pp. 1-25Published by: De GruyterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40914015 .Accessed: 03/07/2013 00:05

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Identity and Infallibility in Plato's Epistemology Travis Butler

Recent years have seen a reinvigoration of a certain traditional account of Plato's epistemology according to which the best kind of cognition of intelligibles is not a matter of holding true views about them, but instead is a kind of unmediated contact between the rational soul and the forms, including especially The Good.1

This reinvigoration has occurred partly as a response to the powerful, global interpretations of Annas, Fine, Irwin and others that attribute a broadly coherentist and thoroughly propositionalist epistemology to Plato, from the early dialogues right through the Theaetetus.2 On this view, to know a form is to possess and defend a correct account of its real nature, and to know The Good is to possess an immense system of such accounts that does nothing less than lay bare the explanatory structure of the world's intelligible order. For the propositionalists, then, knowing is a matter of systematic discursive understanding, while the traditional view sees it as a nonrepresentational relation of rapport or acquaintance with a form.

1 Aspects of the traditional view have been defended by Francisco Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1998); J.M.E. Moravcsik, Plato and Platonism (New York: Cambridge University Press 1992); Kenneth Sayre, Plato's Literary Garden (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1995); and Lloyd Gerson, Knowing Persons (New York: Oxford University Press 2003).

2 Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato's Republic (New York: Oxford University Press 1981), 276-93; Gail Fine, Plato on Knowledge and Forms (New York: Oxford University Press 2003), chs. 2-4; T.H. Irwin, Plato's Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press 1995), 141-7

APEIRON a journal for ancient philosophy and science 0003-6390/2006/3901 001-026 $26.00 Academic Printing & Publishing


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Crucial to the disagreement here is Plato's claim in the Republic that knowledge is infallible whereas even true belief is fallible. Proposition- alists tend to see this as akin to the contemporary view of knowledge but not belief as implying truth. The traditional view sees the infallibility of knowledge as a much deeper point about the difference in nature of knowledge and belief. Because knowledge doesn't involve describing or representing the Forms at all, it's not even the kind of state that can mistakenly describe or misrepresent. In Parts II and III, I try to advance this issue by asking what we can infer about the nature of knowledge from its relation to dialectical understanding.

While my goal is not to settle matters in favor of the representationalist reading, at least insofar as this reading is committed to the claim that knowledge is of propositional representations, I am going to argue that knowledge must be a state in which the subject is conscious of information about the nature of Forms. As such, knowledge is of the same generic type as belief: they're both states that involve thinking of their objects as having certain features and natures. Because knowledge and belief are this way, the infallibility of knowledge must at least partly be a matter of the quality of the information possessed. Knowledge necessarily involves correct and dependable information, whereas belief carries no such guarantee.

Although the view of knowledge as informational is much more congenial to the representationalist interpretation, I think one should be careful not to infer straightway the further claim that Plato has no role for nonrepresentational cognition at any place in his theory. That is, the epistemological question about the nature of knowledge is at least in principle distinct from the question in the philosophy of mind of whether Plato holds in general that there is no cognition without representation. This issue I take up in Part IV.

In speaking of knowledge in what follows, I'll be focusing largely on epistni. The reason for this is that the dispute between the traditional view and the representationalists is primarily over the nature of the best kind of knowledge Plato recognizes, and in Republic VII, in the second discussion of The Line, it is clear that this is epistme: 'It will therefore be enough to call the first section knowledge (episteme), the second thought, the third belief, and the fourth imaging, just as we did before' (533e7- 4al).

In the following section, then, I take up a kind of limiting case of the nonrepresentationalist account of knowledge. On this view, to have knowledge of an object is to become 'cognitionally identical' to it.


Identity and Infallibility in Plato's Epistemology 3

I Affinity is not Identity

In this section, Fm going to discuss several aspects of the most recent and fully developed account of Plato's epistemology that sees the best kind of knowledge as a nonrepresentational relation between the soul and The Good. This view, defended by Lloyd Gerson, is a kind of limiting case of the nonrepresentationalist account, insofar as it sees knowledge as wholly devoid of representations or any other kind of content to which norms of correctness or accuracy apply (Knowing Persons [KP], 82). Knowledge, on this account, is not a matter of possessing correct information about the being or nature of forms. It is rather a matter of becoming identical to the Form of the Good.

One of the primary motivations for Gerson's identity thesis is the need to explain Plato's important claim in the Republic that knowledge is infallible whereas even beliefs that are true are not. I take up this issue in Part III below. In this section, I want to raise some problems for the identity thesis, bearing in mind that the central issue is Plato's claim about the infallibility of knowledge.

The specific passage Gerson primarily appeals to for evidence of the identity thesis is the Affinity Argument (AA) in the Phaedo: 'As we shall see shortly in the AA, Plato views knowing as a state of cognitive identification with the Forms. It is not a representational state. In knowing, the knower becomes what he knows' (KP, 61).

Although Gerson's official account of the AA does not mention cog- nitional identity (KP, 79), it is clear that the line of reasoning to the identity thesis proceeds in two steps: from (1) the claim at Phaedo 79dl-7 that the soul is akin (suggeris) to the forms and in contact (ephaptomene) with them, to (2) the claim that the Forms are literally and directly present to souls, and from (2) to (3) the claim that literal presence is to be understood as identity.

The key to the first transition is the notion of contact, since the notion of kinship is obviously weaker than identity. If Plato wanted to express the idea of unmediated, nonrepresentational presence, contact would be a useful concept, since it would seem to imply or at least suggest the absence of an intermediary. But the problem for the transition from (1) to (2) is that all of the epistemic words Plato uses in the context of the AA to explain how the soul functions when it operates by itself indicate step-wise, representational thinking rather than unmediated identity: the person who approaches being with dianoia and logismos are the ones that will gain wisdom (phronsis), if anyone will (65e8-6a6, 66a7-8, 79d6-7).


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While it would be possible to see Plato as claiming that dianoia and logismos are necessary steps along the way to nonrepresentational identity, the mere fact that Plato uses a contact word is not compelling evidence for this view. It seems at least equally likely that using discursive thought and reasoning about Forms just is being in contact with them, and wisdom is the output of successful thinking and reasoning.3 Thus, I don't see that the notions of kinship and contact can bear the weight of the move from (1) to (2).

Even if one were convinced of this move, however, there is a signifi- cant gap between (2) and (3) as well. If it is the case that the soul's removal from the body also removes the need for representational mediation, this would seem to leave Plato with some version of direct realism: the Forms are strongly independent of the souls that grasp them, but the souls grasp them by cognizing them directly. To explain the literal presence of Forms by the notion of identity is to skip over direct realism in favor of some form of idealism. While it may be true that direct realism is a difficult position to make out, this is obviously a different issue from whether it's what Plato intends by speaking of kinship and contact.

As I understand Gerson, he rules out direct realism because even it leaves too much room for error. This I will discuss below. The point here is that if we understand the situation in which the soul is operating by itself as one in which the Forms are literally present to souls, it is a further and extremely controversial step to see this as a situation in which the subject/object distinction is blurred or eradicated. Given the Euthyphro's rejection of divine projectionism about piety, it would be at least surprising to find Plato moving without announcement from the affinity to the identity thesis.

Finally, I think the identity thesis faces severe problems in its own right, independently of the reasoning in (l)-(3). Here I have in mind the special role of The Good in knowledge. Plato claims explicitly that The Good is not only the medium and cause of knowledge, it is itself an object of knowledge (5083, 516b-c). Indeed on Gerson's view, it is in some sense the only object of knowledge (KP, 177). On the identity thesis, then, knowing The Good is a matter of becoming identical to it.

3 This seems to be Charles Kahn's view: /rThe metaphor of vision for intellectual access to the Forms is useful but altogether dispensable . . . The fundamental conception of the Forms is, from the beginning, linguistic rather than visual in its orientation/ Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (New York: Cambridge University Press 1996), 355.



One problem with this idea is that while it is clear that Plato sees souls and Forms in general as deeply akin, this affinity must be somewhat limited in the case of The Good. The Good is not a garden variety object of knowledge. It is the unhypothetical first principle of everything, superior to knowledge, truth and being (509a). At a minimum, this implies that (i) souls and The Good belong to different ontological types, and (ii) souls stand in a one-way dependence relation with The Good. Thus, it seems to me that the notion of knowledge as identity suffers surplus strain in the case of The Good, because the degree of initial affinity between souls and The Good is much smaller.

The concept that Gerson uses to bridge the gap between the claim that souls are like Forms and that knowing souls become the forms is that of transformation:

That is, the thinker [with wisdom] is aware that it is in a mental state consisting of identity with Forms. On this basis, it is not difficult to see that wisdom would be self-transforming. (KP, 61)

When the soul finally grasps The Good, then, it is transformed in a kind of fusing with its ultimate object.

It is true that Plato does sometimes describe the soul's liberation from the body in terms that suggest transformation, as in the Republic X discussion of what the soul would become if it were to pursue the divine with all of itself (611el-5). But in this passage it is clear that the suggested transformation is from complexity to simplicity.4 Perhaps the nonra- tional parts of the soul are so many shells that will fall away when it grasps its kindred objects. Since the affinity between souls and forms obtains even when the soul is in its alienated and shaggy state, it's hard to believe that the concept of affinity itself is supposed to intimate the identity view.

Thus I don't think this kind of transformation moves us beyond the Phaedo's claim that souls are akin to Forms. Indeed, the Republic X passage explicitly recalls the Phaedo passage by its use of the notion of kinship (611e2). Moreover, at 611a4-8, Socrates states that the same number of souls always exist, which would seem to require that souls retain their numerical distinctness through all eternity. Despite his deep

4 Here I have been helped by Christopher Shields, 'Simple Souls', in Ellen Wagner, ed., Essays on Plato's Psychology (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2001), 137-56.


6 Travis Butler

commitment to the affinity between souls and Forms, Plato always stops short of the identity thesis.

A final concern is that the identity thesis in the case of The Good seems to make Plato vulnerable to David Sachs' charge that the way Plato connects justice and happiness misses the point of Glaucon's challenge in Book II.5 The gravamen of this charge is that Plato only succeeds in connecting justice to happiness by substantially changing what the connected terms mean. Glaucon challenges Socrates to connect 'common sense' justice and happiness but Socrates only connects 'Platonic' justice and happiness.

While I think Plato must be allowed the freedom to revise concepts to some extent, it is clear that Plato himself wanted his accounts of justice and happiness to make substantial contact with the more ordinary notions, given his argument in Book IV that Platonically just individuals will not engage in ordinary injustice (442e-3b).

But if justice requires knowledge, and knowledge requires becoming identical to the unhypothetical first principle of everything, it's not at all clear that justice and happiness bear any similarity at all to the ordinary notions. For example, it's surely part of the ordinary notion of happiness that, however similar are the principles of order of individual humans and the intelligible structure of the universe, what it is to be an individual human and what it is to be that structure are radically different. If achieving happiness requires replacing one's human nature with the nature of the unhypothetical first cause, we're clearly no longer discuss- ing the kind of individual happiness that Thrasymachus denies the just and grants the tyrant. While one might be conceptually required to see identity with The Good as in some sense a good state of affairs, one might be similarly required to ask skeptically what this state of affairs has to do with human happiness.

What this shows, I think, is that while it is sometimes appropriate to describe moral and epistemic norms as a matter of becoming like certain ideals, it is altogether different to require literal identity with those ideals.6 What I've argued in this section is that neither the language of

5 David Sachs, Fallacy in Plato's Republic', in Gregory Vlastos, ed., Plato II (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1978), 35-51

6 David Sedley writes: 'The goal of ''becoming like god so far as is possible7' falls strictly within the confines of an incarnate life, and governs the way in which that



the Phaedo nor the argumentative structure of the Republic makes it likely that Plato bypasses the affinity thesis in favor of the identity thesis.

II Representation and Information

With its eradication of the subject/ object distinction, the identity view is a limiting case of the more familiar view according to which the best kind of knowledge is a nonrepresentational grasp of or insight into the being of forms. In this section, I want to change focus from the identity thesis itself to the idea of nonrepresentational knowledge in general, beginning with the motivation for this idea.

As mentioned above, the primary epistemological motivation for Gerson's identity thesis is Plato's claim that knowledge, unlike even true belief, is infallible. It is certainly appropriate to ask this fact about knowledge to do heavy lifting, given its relation to the unique impor- tance of knowledge and the significance of knowledge to the proper role of the philosopher in the just city.

In section III below, I'm going to present my own interpretation of Plato's infallibility doctrine. In this section, I want first to give my sense of the lay of the land and then start to clear out space for and explain the motivation of the account I defend in III.

Perhaps the most familiar account of the infallibility of knowledge in Plato is presented by Vlastos. On his view, infallibility involves two elements: (i) necessary truth, and (ii) recognition of necessary truth as such, leading to certainty. Thus, whereas a true belief can be merely true, a piece of knowledge must be true and something of which the subject is certain, because of the evidentness of the truth: ' "Infallible" then must be what Plato means. So he is maintaining that we know that is true only when we possess the very highest degree of certainty concerning the truth of P.'7 In cases of knowledge, the subject is able to 'see' the object's truth, or the manifest absurdity of its denial. Let's call this kind of infallibility 'Evidence Infallibility' (El).

life is to be led. We are urged to achieve assimilation to god, if at all, within our present lifespan/ 'The Ideal of Godlikeness', in Gail Fine, ed., Plato 2 (New York: Oxford University Press 1999), 309-28, at 310.

7 Gregory Vlastos, 'Socrates' Disavowal of Knowledge', The Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1985) 1-31, at 13


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One way to respond to El is to claim that it requires too much. On this view of infallibility, call it Minimal Infallibility (MI), El builds too much into infallibility by requiring not just truth, but truth that is evident as such. MI holds by contrast that knowledge can be sufficiently distinguished from belief solely on the basis of the implication between knowledge and truth. Gail Fine captures MI:

Knowledge and belief do different work, Plato tells us, in that knowledge but not belief is infallible (anhamarteton; 477e6-7). This might only mean that knowledge but not belief implies truth; that's one way (the only correct way) to read the slogan "if you know, you can't be wrong"; and it's the only reading of the slogan the argument requires.8

For the MI view, then, the infallibility of knowledge is simply the analytic connection between knowledge and truth. False belief is possible, false knowledge is not. Questions of evidentness and certainty are outside the scope of the infallibility issue.

From the point of view of the nonrepresentationalist account, one problem for MI is that if the infallibility of knowledge is merely its relation to truth, it would seem that true belief should be similarly infallible.9 True belief implies truth no less than knowledge does. But Plato's argument from the difference between knowledge and belief will fail if one species of belief is just as infallible as knowledge.

But the fundamental problem with MI from this point of view is one it shares with El, despite El's more demanding condition of certainty. This is the fact that both MI and El understand knowledge as a matter of holding true views or possessing correct information about the Forms. Knowledge is thus of the same generic type as fallible cognitions such as belief. If knowledge has the nature of an informational state, then there is always a real question about the quality of the information - does the information capture the Form correctly? Gerson rejects MI and El on these grounds:

If knowledge were representational, infallibility could in principle not be preserved because there would be no way of inferring from a

8 Gail Fine, 'Knowledge and Belief in Republic V-VIF, in Plato on Knowledge and Forms (New York: Oxford University Press 2003), 85-166, at 91

9 Vlastos also raises this worry for MI in 'Disavowal, at 13.



representational state any objective state of affairs. There is no mental state that entails truth so long as that mental state is representationalist . . . Even if I find it inconceivable that "7+5= 12" is false, it does not follow that it is true. (KP, 82, 222)

It is because the presence of representation raises the possibility of error in the way suggested in the quotation that Gerson 'rigorously excludes' it from knowledge (161). If knowledge includes no representation, then it is not even the kind of state that can err or be mistaken. I take it this is what Gerson intends by the qualifier 'in principle'. Preserving infallibility in principle is giving knowledge a nature that bars the application of norms of correctness or accuracy. It is in this way more analogous to pain, fevers and certain emotions than to belief:

Speaking broadly, what differentiates representational from non-representational human states or activities is epistemic assessability. For example, a belief can be assessed as true or false, whereas a feverish state, for example, cannot be so assessed. (KP, 82)

Let's call this Maximalist Infallibility (Max). What I want to begin to argue now is that Max is such a strong infallibility condition that it's not at all clear that making knowledge nonrepresentational is sufficient to secure it.

As mentioned in Part I above, direct realism is one kind of nonrepresentationalist view of the relation between subject and object. But on some versions of direct realism, the directness of the cognition does not rule out the possibility of error. There are at least two kinds of views that can combine nonrepresentational access to objects with the possibility of error.

On the first way, although beliefs and knowledge are seen as involv- ing propositional content, the thinker's relation to the constituents of the proposition is in some cases direct and de re. If the content of the thought is a singular proposition, for example, the thinker may have direct access to the object that stands as the subject term of the proposition. This kind of nonrepresentational cognition of an object can be fallible, however, in the following sense. There may be cases in which the subject thinks she is thus related to an object when in fact there is no object (e.g., a hallucination of a dagger). In such a case, the proposition is not how the thinker takes it to be, although he cannot tell this 'from the inside'.

If this kind of case is possible, then de re cognition of this sort is fallible in the sense that there are subjectively indistinguishable cases where


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there is no de re contact, and this is a clear sense in which the cognition is mistaken.10 Some take this kind of de re thought to be possible even with respect to numbers, in which case a tolerably clear analogy to thought about Forms is possible.11

On the second way of combining nonrepresentationality and fallibil- ity, nonrepresentational cognition is indeed taken to be prior to and explanatory of propositional ways of thinking, but the nonrepresentational cognition conveys information to the subject, and at least some of this information can be mistaken. According to the so-called 'relational' theory of experience, for example, nonrepresentational experience of physical objects grounds the kind of knowledge of demonstrative reference exemplified in successful action on objects, but infallibility of information is not required for experience to play this role. Information about an object's location, for example, can be partially mistaken, so long as it is sufficiently accurate to 'set the target' for the visuomotor systems involved in acting on the object.12

Because of these possibilities, it is not the case that the mere appeal to the concept of the nonrepresentational is sufficient for Max infallibility. Thus, if the nature of knowledge is to rule out the possibility of error in the Max sense, it must not only be free of representation, but of information about the object altogether, in something like the way that a fever does not convey to its subject information about its cause. The difference between Max and the other views, then, is not just in the details of their

10 A different kind of case of this sort may be Thomas Reid's theory of sense perception. Reid claims that although a sensation is a sign of an external object, the sensation Vas never made an object of thought, either by the vulgar or by philosophers; nor has it a name in any language/ An Inquiry into the Human Mind, V ii: 56. The sensation plays some role in the genesis of the perception, but not as an object of awareness or thought. The external objects are perceived directly, but perception involves conception and thus is liable to error. Here I've been helped by John Greco, 'Reid's Reply to the Skeptic', in Terence Cuneo and Rene van Woudenberg, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003), 134-55.

11 This possibility is considered by David Kaplan, 'Afterthoughts', in Joseph Almog, John Perry and Howard Wettstein, eds., Themes from Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Press 1989), 565-614, at 607.

12 Here I have in mind John Campbell, Reference and Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press 2002), 55-6.



accounts. It's in the way they understand the infallibility condition itself: Max requires that knowledge not even belong to the genus 'informational cognitive state', since if it did, the question of the correctness of the information would arise.

It will perhaps not be surprising that my strategy in the next section will be to present an account of infallibility that sits between the MI and Max alternatives. The infallibility of knowledge is more than just the implication of truth, but much less radical than the informationless relation of Max. To conclude this section, I want to introduce another condition that Plato imposes on knowledge - a condition that must coexist with the Infallibility Condition. It is the 'Dialectical Under- standing Condition' (DUC), and it is expressed in passages such as these:

(Tl) A man who has knowledge (aner epistamenos) would be able to give an account of what he knows, or would he not? (Phd 76b5-6)

(T2) At any rate, no one will dispute it when we say that there is no other inquiry [apart from dialectic] that systematically attempts to grasp with respect to each thing itself what the being of it is, for all the other crafts are concerned with human opinions and desires, with growing or construction, or with the care of growing or constructed things. (R 533bl-6)

(T3) Then the same applies to the good. Unless someone can distinguish in an account the form of the good from everything else, can survive all refutation, as if in a battle, striving to judge things not in accordance with opinion but in accordance with being, and can come through all this with his account still intact, you'll say that he doesn't know The Good itself or any other good. {R 534b8-c5)

In these passages, Plato clearly associates the best kind of cognition, epistm, with successful definition of Forms and dialectical defense of those definitions. This implies that epistm is at least intimately connected to richly informational states that we would associate with the concepts of explanation and understanding.

The reason such passages have not been taken as proof texts against the nonrepresentationalist reading is that Plato stops short of claiming explicitly that defining and defending are the nature of knowledge. Nonrepresentationalist interpreters take Plato only to be claiming that correct definition and successful dialectical defense are consequences or derivative images of nonrepresentational knowledge.


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One problem with this view of the nature of knowledge is that dialectic itself is explicitly presented as the 'coping stone', with no indication that it's only a derivative epistemic phenomenon (534e-5a). Although some aspects of the Sun image might suggest the view of knowledge of The Good as a kind of quasi-perceptual grasping, the fact is that Plato locates definition and dialectic at the highest level of The Line - the level of epistm. At the very end of Republic VI, Plato states that the clarity of the cognitions along the line varies with the share of truth enjoyed by the objects (511e2-4). In the sequel in Book VII, moreover, Plato passes immediately from the introduction of epistm as the name for the best cognition to a description of the dialectician and his ability (534a-c, as in T3). If Plato held the view that dialectical success is a derivative and inferior phenomenon, it would not tend to clearness for him to locate dialectic in the area where truth is grasped with the greatest accuracy.

But let's set these considerations aside for the moment and pursue further the possibility that definition and dialectic are inferior activities, derivative from knowledge. If we are to believe that despite Plato's love of accounts, he sees knowledge as having a radically different, informationless nature, it presumably must at least turn out that the possession of epistm is connected to successful definition and defense in an intimate and explanatory way.13 It cannot merely be the case the epistm and dialectical success are constantly conjoined. Rather, it must be precisely because philosophers possess epistm that they are able to define The Good and successfully defend their account without use of hypotheses. Their epistm in this way grounds their knowledge of all the other goods, including justice, and thus their claim to rule. Let's call this necessary causal connection between knowledge and dialectical success the 'Dialectical Understanding Condition' (DUC).

But it is very hard to see how this turns out true on the account of knowledge that follows from the Max construal of the Infallibility Con- dition. That is, if we have to drain knowledge of all information about

13 As indeed is recognized by interpreters who claim that nonrepresentational episteme is 'exhibited7 or 'made manifest7 in definition and dialectic. It must be because knowledge has the nature it has that it has the manifestations it has. If knowledge is not informational at all, how can it have those manifestations? See Gonzalez, Dialectic, 224 and Moravcsik, Platonism, 17-28.



the Forms in order to secure the infallibility of knowledge, it becomes wholly mysterious how knowledge, as an informationless state, can explain the astonishingly comprehensive dialectical ability that is char- acteristic of those who know.

To see this more clearly, let's return again briefly to contemporary direct realism. On this view, nonrepresentational experience has substantive explanatory work to do. For example, it is because I have direct experience of that baseball that I am able to understand 'that baseball' and reach up and catch it. Experience, a nonrepresentational cognition, has a nature that's fundamentally different from knowledge of reference and practical action, but it's able to explain them. My point is that experience is only able to explain them because it provides the subject with all kinds of information about the baseball - it's location, velocity and so on. If experience had no content that could be assessed for accuracy or correctness, it would be utterly unable to explain how I know what 'that baseball' refers to or how I manage to catch its referent.

Similarly, it seems to me that if epistn is going to play a substantive role in explaining definitional and dialectical success, it has to include information about the objects of these activities.14 If knowledge is more like a fever than an informational belief, then there's no more reason to expect being in a state of knowledge to explain the understanding of the cause of that state, The Good, than there is to expect being in fever to explain understanding of that state's cause. Trying to get dialectical success from an informationless state to which norms of correctness don't even apply would seem to be a case of demanding blood from a stone. On the other hand, if knowledge is a state in which the subject is conscious of information about the Forms, especially The Good, then it's clear how we can get from that state to successful definition and ultimately dialectical defense.

14 This line of reasoning also bears on Francisco Gonzalez' claim that propositions stating how a thing is qualified are 'given content and meaning by nonpropositional insight into what the thing is.' If the propositions are given content by epistm, then presumably epistm must be informational in my sense. Although I'm not commit- ting myself to the propositional reading, if epistm is information and it's giving content to propositions that have thing /quality structure, it's hard to see what remains of Gonzalez' claim that the insight is nonpropositional. See Gonzalez, Dialectic, 170.


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Let me be careful to say that I am not assuming that direct realism is true or even ultimately defensible. Rather, I'm seeking to understand how knowledge, if it is nonrepresentational, can nevertheless play the relevant role in Plato's epistemology more generally. To this end, I'm appealing to contemporary direct realism as a heuristic, along something like the following lines:

Explanandum Explanans

Direct Realism knowledge of reference nonrepresentational experience

Plato definition and dialectic nonrepresentational knowledge

In both of these cases, an interesting explanatory relation is alleged to hold between the two phenomena, even though their natures are radically different: a nonrepresentational phenomenon is thought to explain an epistemic phenomenon with a discursive, representational nature.

I'm arguing that there would only be hope for the explanatory relation to obtain if the nonrepresentational states were states in which the subject is conscious of information about the objects of the states. Non- representational experience of a baseball won't be able to explain knowledge of the reference of 'that baseball' exhibited in catching it, and nonrepresentational knowledge of The Good or Justice won't be able to explain correct definition and dialectical defense unless those states involve conscious possession of information about the relevant objects (the baseball, the Forms). But if they do involve such information, then Max Infallibility won't be applicable to them, since it will be possible at least to raise the question of the quality and extent of the information conveyed in those states. Thus, if epistm is to meet the DUC, Max Infallibility must be given up.

To see more clearly the relation I'm urging between the Infallibility and Dialectical Understanding Conditions, it will be useful to consider a possible counter-example to my claim that a state's being informational is incompatible with Max. It might be argued that the thought involved in Descartes' cogito is a state in which the subject is conscious of information about an object, but error is ruled out, in a sense strong enough for Max. Any time the thought is tokened, it must be true.

What might make this case suitable for Max rather than just El is that it's the very act of thinking that secures the truth of the known thing. Of



course for Max, the known thing can't be understood as the proposition that I'm a thinking thing or that thinking exists, but rather the object must be myself as a thinking thing.

But whatever we understand as the object of this special knowledge, I think it should be clear why there's going to be a problem getting from this kind of nonrepresentational knowledge to dialectical understanding of the Forms. Even if it allowed that the knowledge in this case extends to my identity with the thinking thing, it is wholly unclear how the thinker can get from this kind of knowledge to accounts that grasp the being of each form, to say nothing of ultimate dialectical defensibility.

To put the point perhaps somewhat crudely, what Descartes' thinker gets is knowledge of one truth about herself, with variations for different modes of thinking, and she only gets it while she is actively thinking. That well is far too shallow to get Plato's philosopher where he's going:

Then also understand that, by the other subsection of the intelligible, I mean that which reason itself grasps by the power of dialectic. It does not consider these hypotheses as first principles, but as stepping stones to take off from, enabling it to reach the unhypothetical first principle of everything. Having grasped this principle, it reverses itself and, keeping hold of what follows from it, comes down to a conclusion without use of anything visible at all, but only of forms themselves, moving on from forms to forms, and ending in forms. (511b3-c2)

Although many aspects of this passage are obscure, it's clear at least that the kind of thinking reason is involved in is step-wise, and the steps are different. One moves from the grasp of one to another, and so on. There is no indication that the object of these states is the thinker himself, much less that the acts of thinking are the truthmakers.

Thus, while cases like the cogito may combine information with something like Max Infallibility, the meager informational resources they provide and the truthmaking role of the acts of thinking themselves prevent such cases from serving as models for Platonic knowledge.

What these considerations show, I think, is that the DUC imposes a constraint on our understanding of the Infallibility Condition. Because knowledge has to be a state in which the subject is conscious of information about the Forms, its infallibility must be understood very differently from Max. The infallibility of knowledge must be connected both to the correctness of the information possessed and the defensibility of the accounts that embody that information.


16 Travis Butler

III Knowledge and Infallibility

If the argument of the preceding section is sound, then the infallibility of knowledge must at least partly consist in the quality of the information about Forms embodied in knowledge states. In short, infallibility must at least partially have to do with the correctness of the information. The challenge will then be to explain how knowledge is infallible and true belief is not, if they both involve correct information.

To Plato's credit, I think he has a number of different kinds of resources available to explain infallibility, so I don't think it's necessary either to drain knowledge of its informational content (as on Max), or to see infallibility as a unitary concept exhausted by the connection between knowledge and truth (as on MI).

Of course, the connection between knowledge and truth is a signifi- cant element of the concept. In an important methodological passage in the Meno, Socrates states that in order to give answers that are proper to dialectic (dialektikteron), the answers must be true (75d2-7). Recall also that the cognitive powers along The Line are said to have as much clarity as the contents of the corresponding section have a share in the truth (metechei aletheias, 511e2-4). Thus, when Plato claims that dialectic grasps being and defines The Good as different from everything else, we must understand these as success verbs: the dialectician correctly grasps and defines the being of each thing. In this way, again, knowledge is a state in which the subject is conscious of correct information about the being of intelligible objects. The state of belief does not carry this implication.

As we've seen, defenders of nonrepresentational contact object to this account of infallibility on the grounds that while the connection to truth may distinguish knowledge from belief in general, it cannot distinguish knowledge from true belief, and Plato is especially concerned with this distinction. Here I think it is possible for the representationalist inter- preter to appeal to other aspects of the concept of infallibility to establish the distinction between knowledge and true belief.15

One relevant point here has recently been made by C.D.C. Reeve. Reeve suggests that when Plato claims that knowers give logoi of their hypotheses, he doesn't just mean defining accounts, he means argu-

15 Many of the ideas I present in this section do not originate with me. Although I have not drawn on them specifically in constructing this section, see especially Annas, Introduction, 272-93 and Irwin, Plato's Ethics, 143-7.



merits that make their truth evident {phaneron, 510dl).16 If we take the explicit example of hypothesis in the Meno (87a-c), this would amount to the view that not only would virtue and knowledge have to be given correct defining accounts, the dialectician would need to show the connection between them by giving an argument. Only then would there be knowledge of the hypothesis that virtue is knowledge. True belief, by contrast, does not require logoi in either the account or argument sense.

But notice that this kind of evidentness need not imply certainty, in anything like the hyper-rationalist sense of EL When the philosopher successfully defines virtue and knowledge and makes evident their connection, appreciating their connection will not necessarily involve seeing all rival views as manifestly contradictory. Seeing the connection can be consistent with coherently entertaining alternatives.

Another resource from the Meno is Plato's claim that the difference between knowledge and true belief is that the former is stable and doesn't wander, because it is tied down with reasoning about the cause (98al-4). If we connect this point with the Republic's claims that dialectic (i) grasps the being of each thing, and (ii) defines and defends the correct account of The Good, two further aspects of the infallibility of knowledge can be seen to emerge.

First, although it is difficult to determine precisely what Plato has in mind, it is clear that Plato sees the infallibility of knowledge as deriving partly from the objects of knowledge themselves:

We've now discovered, it seems, that according to the many conven- tions of the majority of people about beauty and the others, the [many beautif uls] are rolling around as intermediates between what is not and what purely is ... And we agreed that anything of that kind would have to be called the opinable, not the knowable . . . What about the ones who in each case study the things themselves that are always the same in every respect? Won't we say they know and don't opine? Necessarily. (479d3-5, d7-8, e7-9)

Let me focus here on the aspects of this chunk of doctrine relevant to the themes discussed above. Recall Plato's claim that the cognitions along The Line grasp truth more clearly as we ascend. Thus, belief has

16 C.D.C. Reeve, 'Plato's Metaphysics of Morals', Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 25 (2003) 39-58, at 40-1


18 Travis Butler

some share in truth, but not the same share that knowledge does. Clearly this is related to the claim in T2 above that the dialectician grasps systematically the being of each thing - what it is. Whether we understand the contrast class as including sensible objects, properties, or both, it's clear Plato thinks that accounts that make reference to such entities grasp at best necessary conditions rather than the 'true cause' or being of the object in question (Phaedo 99a-b). And nothing prevents what is a necessary condition for some sensible case of F from being a sufficient condition for some other case of not-F. Bright color can be necessary for the beauty of a sunset and sufficient for the ugliness of a leisure suit.17 Because having bright color is a way in which some things are beautiful, the view of beauty as bright color does not miss the truth entirely, but it is certainly fallible, and indeed perhaps no more closely connected with beauty than with its opposite.

A second kind of infallibility is suggested in T2 above, in the claim that dialectical knowledge of The Good survives all attempts at refutation, in the manner of a victor in a battle.18 If one's account of the unhypothetical first principle of everything can really survive all examination, there is a clear sense in which one's knowledge of this account and perhaps everything that depends on it is infallible and in no danger of wandering from one's soul. This kind of account is paradigmatically dependable, in the sense that there is no argument or consideration that can undermine it. As Plato puts it in the Timaeus, knowledge is 'unmoved by persuasion', whereas even true belief gives in (51e4).

Finally, there is undoubtedly a connection between the two kinds of infallibility and freedom from wandering just sketched. To the extent that one's account grasps at best necessary conditions, one's account is to that extent liable to refutation. These aspects of 'infallibility as dependability' are different from the core aspect of truth, and thus can serve to distinguish knowledge not just from belief, but from true belief as well.

From the point of view of Max Infallibility, one problem for the view I'm sketching is that if knowledge and belief are both informational, then there's no guarantee that the subject will be able to distinguish those among her informational states that are knowledge and those that are

17 Here I follow Fine, Plato on Knowledge, 93.

18 On p. 50 of 'Plato's Metaphysics of Morals', Reeve argues that this can be thought of as a kind of elenctic proof.



merely belief. Unless their intrinsic character is radically different, these states may seem the same 'from the inside'.

This worry supposes that for Plato, when one knows that p, one knows that one knows p. While it is plausible to attribute this view to Plato, the contexts in which something like this doctrine emerges are all contexts in which the strong suggestion is that both first- and second-order knowledge come by way of dialectical examination of the first-order item. Socrates examines the poets, politicians and craftsmen to see whether their second-order beliefs about what they know are in fact true. Because their first-order beliefs do not survive refutation, they are shown to lack knowledge of what they know and don't know (Apology, 21-3). In the Charmides, Socrates defends his examination of others by reference to his own self-knowledge:

How could you possibly think that even if I were to refute everything you say, I would be doing it for any other reasons than the one I would give for a thorough investigation of my own statements - the fear of unconsciously thinking I know something when I do not. (166c7-d2)

We've already seen that the defensibility condition applies even to knowledge of The Good. Another example is Socrates' discussion with the slave in the Meno. There Socrates explicitly states that the difference between the slave's true belief and the knowledge he may come to have is further questioning, presumably leading to maximal defensibility. If such questioning takes place, the slave's knowledge will become 'as accurate as anyone's'. Here it may be important that the knowledge- word Plato chooses for the terminus is 'episfni' (85dl).19

This suggests, I think, that, although Plato does believe that knowledge carries with it knowledge of knowledge, he does not defend this claim by appealing to some internal mark of knowledge states such as nonrepresen-

19 I cannot agree with Gonzalez and Nicholas Smith who independently argue that the fact that epistem can come in degrees of accuracy shows that it must be nonpropositional. Both authors argue from the fact that for any proposition, one either knows it or one doesn't to the fact that propositional knowledge cannot come in degrees. But surely this is not the case with other propositional attitudes. Two soccer fans may both hope that England will win the World Cup, but the fanatic has a greater degree of hope than the casual fan. Nothing about the existence of a threshold implies that everyone who meets it stands at the very same place. See Gonzalez (1998), 171, and Nicholas D. Smith, 'Knowledge by Acquaintance and "Knowledge What" in Plato's Republic', Dialogue 18 (1979) 281-8, at 285.


20 Travis Butler

tationality or 'clarity and distinctness'. Rather, the mark has to do with defensibility. Knowledge claims must be established by accounts and arguments that render evident the connections between the intelligibles in question (e.g., piety and justice, virtue and knowledge) and ultimately The Good. So, I don't think it follows from Plato's commitment to (1) If S knows that , S knows that she knows p, that he's also committed to (2) If S knows that , S knows that she knows because the knowledge state announces itself as knowledge via an internal mark of truth.20

Thus, while it would be open to Plato to explain why knowledge implies knowledge of knowledge by reference to some kind of transpar- ency doctrine, the textual evidence rather suggests that one becomes aware of one's knowledge as knowledge by testing it successfully against the objections and alternatives of fellow dialecticians.

To reiterate, the notion of infallibility that incorporates defensibility in this way will not necessarily involve subjective certainty, in the sense of the inability to conceive of the defended item's falsity. My account is in this way weaker than both Max and EL But the degree to which this kind of defensibility departs from certainty should not be overstated. For when Plato insists that one's accounts must survive all attempts at refutation, he surely has in mind attempts made by people who are themselves skilled dialecticians. It won't do to seek out the cobblers and subject your views about virtue and The Good to their scrutiny. If the best arguments of the best dialecticians cannot undermine an account, the distance between 'hasn't failed yet' and 'cannot fail' is perhaps not terribly great. This idea is borne out later in the Gorgias:

These conclusions, at which we arrived earlier in our previous discus- sions are, I'd say, held down and bound by arguments of iron and adamant, even if it's rather rude to say so. So it would seem anyhow. And if you or someone more forceful than you won't undo them, then

20 Gerson argues that knowledge is infallible insofar as it is not 'adventitiously connected to the truth'. But he then immediately infers that what is known must be self-evidently true, and this can only happen by identity between subject and object (157). But even the most rabid externalist about justification can agree that a state of knowledge is not adventitiously connected to the truth. If a state is the product of a generally reliable process, for example, it won't be merely adventitiously connected to the truth. Self-evidence is only one of indefinitely many ways of satisfying the nonadventitiousness condition. For discussion of this fact see Robert Brandom, 'Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism', The Monist (1998) 371-91.



anyone who says anything other than what I'm now saying cannot be speaking well. (508e6-9a4)

Notice that Socrates is willing to infer from the defense of his own view that it is not possible (ouk oion, 509a3) for any rival view to be well said.21 This is what we should expect given his earlier claim that an account's not being refuted is a mark of its truth (473b 10-1).

While this view makes the mark of knowledge to some extent public and intersubjectively available, it does not necessarily make the standard of knowledge subjective or otherwise judgment-dependent. This is so, first, because knowledge requires truth and truth is made evident by defensibility but it isn't constituted by it, and, second, because the standard of ultimate defensibility may itself be an objective standard to which 'real life' examinations and defenses stand in various degrees of closeness.

Finally, to see knowledge and its infallibility in the dialectical way described above is not necessarily to embrace the coherentist idea that the only warrant-increasing property of an account is its defensibility by reference to other accounts or beliefs.22 It may be that some accounts also have a degree of warrant or evident truth (short of certainty) because of their internal character. For example, Socrates' definition of shape as the limit of a solid presumably derives its warrant both from relations among the concepts involved and from relations of dependence and explanation between it and other claims (Meno, 76a4-7). But whatever we say about the presence of foundationalist elements in Plato's theory as a whole, I think that the textual evidence strongly suggests that the infallibility of knowledge has as much to do with the dependability of

21 Perhaps then what we should say is that ultimate defensibility yields infallibility in the sense that the defended belief cannot be overridden. No consideration or argument can justify one in believing anything else on the topic. This leaves open the possibility that the belief can be undermined. If, for example, Socrates was convinced by a number of medical experts that a brain tumor was systematically distorting his thinking and reasoning, this might lead him rationally to give up his account, but this would of course similarly undermine confidence in any other account. Here I have been helped by Albert Casullo, A Priori Justification (New York: Oxford University Press 2003), 56-62. Thanks to Bryan Belknap for discussion.

22 As perhaps is suggested in Fine, Plato on Knowledge, 112-6. Fine allows that Plato may have some role for the nonrepresentational, although she casts doubt on the idea in footnote 50 on 114.


22 Travis Butler

knowledge in dialectical contexts as with the implication between knowledge and truth.

IV Conclusion: A Role For the Nonrepresentational?

In my introduction, I claimed that it's possible to distinguish the epistemological question of whether Plato sees the nature of the best kind of knowledge as nonrepresentational from the question of whether Plato has reason to recognize nonrepresentational cognition at any place in his theory.23 To conclude, I'd like to speculate a bit about a different way in which nonrepresentational cognition might play a role in Plato's theory of cognition more generally.

As a way to begin the speculation, it is noteworthy that although it is not typically used as the foundation of a global Two- Worlds' interpretation, Aristotle also uses the metaphor of contact to describe one kind of thinking about essences. In Metaphysics IX 10, noesis of simples (ta asuntheta) is described as touching or contact. The only kind of error possible in these cases is ignorance (agnoia) due to failure of contact. Nous-as-contact is distinguished from thinking that involves synthesis and thus results in states that are truth-evaluable in the standard way.

While I do not put the following forward as a complete account of these vexing passages, I think at least part of what Aristotle is reaching for in speaking of thought-as-contact is a distinction between synthetic thoughts that are truth-evaluable and cognitive necessary conditions of such thoughts.24 In order to combine unsynthesized thoughts into truth- evaluable ones, it is necessary first to make contact with the components. Because contact is logically prior to synthesis, falsity is not possible, only contact-failure .

It seems to me that these issues in Aristotle's philosophy of judgment may shed some light on Plato's response to Meno's paradox. As I understand Meno's paradox, part of what Plato is asking about is an issue he returns to at the end of the Theaetetus. This is the issue of the

23 In her most recent paper on these topics, Gail Fine also suggests that it's worth distinguishing these questions. 'Knowledge and True Belief in the Meno', Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 27 (2004) 41-81, at 49.

24 Here I have been influenced by Michael Wedin, Mind and Imagination in Aristotle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1988), 131-3.



stringency of the conditions not just for having knowledge of an object, but for making truth-evaluable judgments about it at all (209a-c). For if the conditions for judgment are very demanding, satisfying them may render further inquiry otiose - one will already know what there is to know. If this is part of what Plato is interested in, we can see why he addresses it as a serious philosophical problem, and perhaps also why he thought the recollection story was on point.

As Gail Fine has demonstrated, it is possible to offer a representationalist account of the Meno passages in which all of the 'other- worldly' aspects of the response drop out. On Fine's view, Plato only needs to appeal to true belief: true beliefs give us something to go on, but because they're inferior to knowledge, they still leave us with something to do. Since the disembodied cognition described in the recollection story isn't necessary for the possession of true beliefs, it isn't necessary to Plato's response to Meno's paradox.25

Critics of Fine's account have argued that her treatment of the paradox sees it as a problem about inquiry when the second horn of the dilemma reveals it as a problem about discovery: 'If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?' (80d7-8)26

But this idea sits uncomfortably with the fact that Socrates himself refers to it as a problem about inquiry (80el-5). The difficulty for us is determining just which problem about inquiry Plato is trying to raise. To lend credence to the idea that the discussion of judgment in the Theaetetus is relevant to Meno's paradox, I think it's worth noticing that a number of the issues raised in the discussion of Meno's paradox are also raised at the end of the Theaetetus: (1) the distinction between true belief and knowledge, (2) the view that something must be added to true belief to get knowledge, and (3) the question of what is required to fix on an object for truth-evaluable judgment in general, prior to the stage of knowledge.27

25 Fine, Plato on Knowledge, 44-65

26 Panagiotis Dimas, True Belief in the Meno', Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 14 (1996) 1-32. For the discovery idea, see also Dominic Scott, Recollection and Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press 1995), 30-5.

27 Similarities in the language of the Meno's discussion of recollection and the end of the Theaetetus are pursued by David Sedley in The Midwife ofPlatonism (New York: Oxford University Press 2004), 20-1, 28-30.


24 Travis Butler

Focusing on issue (3) may serve to illuminate both Meno's paradox itself as well as the broader issues about representation and information. What I'm suggesting is that the two ends of the paradox work together to raise the following issue: how do we succeed in fixing on an object for truth-evaluable judgment without knowing so much about it that further inquiry is otiose?28

As an example of what I have in mind, let's consider the passage about the virtues in the Phaedo. In that discussion, Socrates states that both moderation and justice are purgings of all things bodily (69b8-c3). If we think of 'a certain kind of purging of bodily things' as a preliminary account of both moderation and justice, then it seems that Socrates associates the same information with both virtues.

But then in a scenario in which Socrates wants to inquire further into one or the other of moderation or justice, it's unclear how he will be able to succeed in fixing on one, rather than the other, given that his information ('a certain kind of purging') does not distinguish between them. Thus, on the one hand, there seems to be a problem not just for having knowledge of moderation and justice, but for fixing determinately on either one for further inquiry, since the information possessed does not distinguish between them.

On the other hand, if what is required to distinguish between them is to determine just which kind of purging they are, then it would seem that something like a definition by genus and differentia is required to fix on them for inquiry at all. Of course, if one already has this kind of definition, it's unclear why further inquiry is called for.

Notice that this way of construing the paradox is not necessarily in competition with the discovery idea. That is, it's perfectly possible that Plato is trying to raise one problem about the beginning of inquiry - how do we succeed in fixing on an object whose nature we don't understand - and one problem about the end of inquiry - how can we tell cases of genuine discovery from the merely apparent?

28 So, pace Dominic Scott, I don't think the inquiry problem turns out 'trivial and easy to solve'. Merely appealing to partial knowledge won't necessarily explain how we succeed in thinking of a given object, as opposed to some other object to which that partial knowledge might be common. The question about inquiry is about the particular kind of partial knowledge that will allow us to fix on the object we want to fix on while still leaving room for progress. See Scott, Recollection, 30.



But if the first problem about the beginning of inquiry is the question of how we succeed in fixing on an object for the sake of truth-evaluable judgments about it, then the true belief view seems unsatisfactory, since true beliefs about objects presuppose the kind of contact or 'fixing on' at issue. The fact that we can form true beliefs about an object seems more like part of the explanandum rather than an acceptable explanans.

Perhaps then the point of Plato's use of notions of contact is to suggest a bipartite theory of the soul's cognition of forms: there is a nonrepresentational contact element (CE) and a representational information element (IE). When the soul is operating by itself, CE and IE coincide, and there is knowledge. But when the soul is embodied, all or part of IE is lost, and must be recovered by examination and dialectic.

Despite the loss of IE, however, CE remains true. That is, it remains true that the soul has observed and been in contact with intelligible objects. Because of this contact, flesh and blood humans are able to fix on and inquire into objects, even without conscious possession of information about the natures of those objects.

Although this picture makes use of nonrepresentational contact, it differs au fond from the traditional Two- Worlds view because it rejects the idea that nonrepresentational contact is the best kind of knowledge of forms. Indeed, in the absence of IE, it isn't knowledge at all. The best kind of knowledge requires conscious possession of special information about the Forms, including The Good. Moreover, it requires thorough examination and defense of the accounts that embody that information.29

Department of Philosophy Iowa State University

402 Catt Hall Ames, IA 50011

U.S.A. [email protected]

29 For comments and discussion, I am grateful to Bryan Belknap, Heimir Geirsson and an anonymous referee for this journal.


Article Contentsp. [1]p. 2p. 3p. 4p. 5p. 6p. 7p. 8p. 9p. 10p. 11p. 12p. 13p. 14p. 15p. 16p. 17p. 18p. 19p. 20p. 21p. 22p. 23p. 24p. 25

Issue Table of ContentsApeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science, Vol. 39, No. 1 (March 2006), pp. 1-90Front MatterIdentity and Infallibility in Plato's Epistemology [pp. 1-25]On "Republic" 596a [pp. 27-32]With and Without "Logos": An Interpretation of Socrates' Dream in the "Theaetetus" [pp. 33-56]Phaethon and the Great Year [pp. 57-90]Back Matter

identity and infallibility in plato's epistemology

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