relation to that extra something is, in this instance, one of mere guesswork both undermines the definition itself and, more specifically, invites the killer question: if not mere guesswork, what is the required cognitive relation between the knowing subject and the extra something?
In thisway, the Theaetetus' final failure to define knowledge as a species of true judgement builds on a suspicion which Plato had long ago depicted hisSocratesasharbouring. I should add here that even asearly asthe quintessentially Socratic Charmides Plato had indicated, if only in passing, Socrates' and his interlocutor's shared assumption that knowledge (epistēmē) and opinion or judgement (doxa) have different objects266—the primary basis of the radical separation between these two cognitive states which Plato would impose once his two-world metaphysics was in place.
Even now, then, asthe Theaetetus' arguments draw to a close, what we are witnessing is the working out of a recognizably Socratic agenda, with results that we are encouraged to see as pointing inexorably towards the Platonist epistemology of the Republic.
been explicated roughly as (1) truly judging that the bright orange disc that you saw rising this morning is the sun, and (2) being able to describe that disc as ‘the brightest of the things in the heaven that orbit the earth’. Such knowledge would be properly summed up as ‘knowing what the sun is’. We were thus, as the investigation collapsed, not so far from Plato'sparadigmatic model of knowledge: knowing of thisor that Form, e.g. Justice, what it is, thanksto the ability when asked what it is to answer with its definition.
What, then, isthe way forward for readersof the Theaetetus to take? Presumably they must retain the key notion of differentiation as the basis of knowledge: that to know something entails being able to distinguish it from all other things has been hinted at repeatedly in the course of the dialogue, and the Aviary passage has in addition revealed Socrates' insight that items of knowledge must be organized taxonomically. What they need to abandon is the idea that true judgement could ever be converted into knowledge by meansof thispower to differentiate.
The Platonist path that lies ahead is one on which knowledge—although nowhere formally defined—will be recognized asa state of mind that differsfar too radically from true judgement to be defined asa speciesof it. Asin RepublicV–VII, generally agreed to pre-date the Theaetetus, so too still in the Timaeus, thought to be a considerably later production, the fully articulated Platonic position remains that knowledge and judgement (or ‘opinion’) are two entirely separate states of mind or faculties, each dealing with its own distinct set of objects. Knowledge is of what-is, the unchanging Forms, while mere judgement is of the sensible world, of items which perpetually ‘become’ without ever
‘being’.267
That positive metaphysical distinction is not part of the equipment deployed by the barren midwife in whose unsettling company readersof the Theaetetus find themselves. But in developing and criticizing the Protagorean theory Socrates has shown the corresponding negative insight that a realm of perpetual becoming without being could not possibly constitute an object of knowledge (179c1–183c7). And in refuting the Dream theory and itssequel he hasdipped his toe once again in metaphysical waters, showing that
267 Ti. 51d3–52a7: true judgement (δόξα) and intellection (νοῦς) are two kinds(γένη) which arise independently (χωϱίς) of each other, and the separate existence of Forms followsfrom thisdistinction. (Although Plato'spreferred term in the Timaeus is νοῦς, at 37c2 and 46d7 he indicatesitsequivalence to ἐπιστήμη.)
Presocratic-style bottom-up analysis of the physical world is not the road to knowledge. His initial insistence that an inquiry into the definition of knowledge must set aside the question what the objects of knowledge are (146b7–8) has come to look increasingly shaky. The introduction of transcendent entities as proper objects of knowledge should, to Platonically informed readers, look like the option which now urgently beckons.
In ways which I have been cataloguing throughout this book, Socrates' critical powers are shown as having led us to the brink of that Platonist discovery. But from here on he was leaving us to make the journey alone. Or, in the idiom of the dialogue, we must ourselves now seek to give birth, and go on to find out whether our new brainchild isone that can be successfully reared. Socrates' investigations of perception, of true and false judgement, and of the difference between true judgement and knowledge, so brilliantly conducted in the Theaetetus, have been our antenatal class.
Additionally, we may by now feel that we have witnessed a reconstruction of Plato's own antenatal class. For Plato is the one person we know of on whom Socratic midwifery has already been exercised with complete success (cf. Chapter 1 §12 above). The Theaetetus has now taught us, in detail, how Socrates' unique skills were the catalyst that liberated Plato from the preceding tradition and brought him to the conception, delivery, and successful nurture of his own philosophy.
One feature of the dialogue as a whole deserves some emphasis at this point. In partI, the most prominent theme that I detected wasthe derivation of Plato'scurrent—that is, middle-period—metaphysics from a Socratic background. In partsIIandIIIthe focus has shifted from the retrospective to the prospective. A growing proportion of our attention hasbeen drawn to ideaswhich Plato hasnot yet systematically explored in writing but will make central to future dialogues—notably the method of Collection and Division, the solution of the falsity puzzle, and the incorporation of a satisfactory physics into his overall epistemology. The gradual progression from retrospect to prospect is itself an artfully contrived and philosophically significant structural feature, consolidating the dialogue's function—asI have presented it—of illuminating the continuity of Plato'spast, present, and future work. But there isa price to pay. It is, I think, the fact that the projectsI have just mentioned lie in the future at the time of writing that givespartsIIandIII, especially the
latter, that frustrating lack of concreteness which has long stood in the way of their interpretation. Intertextuality with future compositions is inevitably a different kind of enterprise from exploiting the reader's knowledge of an existing corpus of work. Or, to put it in terms of the dialogue's dominant metaphor, Socrates cannot so easily be exhibited as the midwife of brainchildren that have yet to be delivered and reared.
Although the Sophist islikely to be of considerably later date, it will be the dramatic continuation of the Theaetetus, and ashe writesthe closing pagesof the Theaetetus Plato clearly has the sequel in mind. First a small clue: in illustrating the nature of a unique distinguishing mark, Socrates has said to Theaetetus that, once he has mastered this, ‘if I meet you tomorrow, it will remind me and make me judge truly about you’ (208c9–10); they will indeed meet tomorrow, and Socrateswill be shown recognizing Theaetetus(Sophist 217d6–7).
Again, and more significant, the closing words of the dialogue are ‘Right now I've got an appointment at the king's Stoa, to answer the writ that Meletus has served on me. Let's meet here again first thing tomorrow morning, Theodorus' (210d2–4). The first half of this closure reminds us of something mentioned in passing in the proem (142c5–6) but easily forgotten, that Socrates is in the last weeks of his life. It is therefore, at least symbolically, appropriate that itssecond half pointsforward to hisreplacement. For in the Sophist, when the next day'smeeting takes place, Theodoruswill turn up accompanied by an anonymousvisitor, an Eleatically trained philosopher who by no stretch of the imagination can be accused of being innocent of metaphysics. This stranger will henceforth replace SocratesasPlato'smain speaker, both in the Sophist itself and in its own dramatic sequel, the Politicus, dialoguesin which Socrates will become an almost silent auditor. At least one of today's central inquiries, the one about falsity, will be continued and brought to a positive and successful conclusion. And the method of Division will take centre stage for the first time.
To put it in terms of the symbolism which I have been commending throughout this book, the midwife of Platonism will have finished discharging his role. The next task, that of articulating the logico-metaphysical truths of Platonism, must inevitably fall to someone else.