In this essay we will first outline Theaetetus’s and Socrates’s positions in the first part of Theaetetus, (151d-186e). We will deliberately not outline the refutations at 160e-183c. Then we will attempt to see Socrates’s reason for rejecting Theaetetus’ claim that “knowledge is perception”. It will be clear that the reason for Socrates’s rejection is the ontological status of the sense-world compared to the qualifications for knowledge. This result is shown by contrasting two possible interpretations; one argues that the work of psyche in relating accounts from different faculties points towards the Forms, whereas another sees the result of psyche as not pointing towards anything but its own working.
Outline of the section
1. Theaetetus’s thesis
At the end of the famous midwifery scene, Socrates asks Theaetetus what knowledge is. The first thesis of the argument is Theaetetus reply, “knowledge is simply perception” (151e). This statement indicates either of two things:
1. all knowing is perception
2. all perception is knowledge
What is perception for Theaetetus? Sensation is a kind of change. It originates in the duality of the subject and the object. Sensation occurs when the object acts upon the sense organ; the object’s motion is an active motion. As this action happens, the faculty of sight undergoes a passive motion, changing in quality from sight in general to a seeing of a particular object. (156) You do not see with sight per se but at the moment of perception the seeing eye comes into being; likewise, the seen object is not whiteness but becomes white.
2. Two additional theories
2.1 Man is the measure of everything
To avoid Theaetetus's theory to be in conflict with experience, Plato brings in two further theories. The first one is that of Protagoras and it is introduced to define what perception is. Protagoras's doctrine, the homo mensura thesis, states that man is the measure of all there is. All truth is strictly relative and private. (154) Here, it lets Socrates say that “Perception, then, is always of what is, and unerring--as befits knowledge.” (152c).
Protagoras’ doctrine fits nicely in with the notion of two motions creating sense-perception: If each man decides what and how everything is, then if there is an outer physical object, it is necessary to have a meeting of the external object and the subjective, unique, percipient. Plato describes this as the meeting of the two motions giving rise to sense-data. In this way, one physical stone can give rise to as many private, uniquely perceived stones as there are percipients. This implies solipsism, though not total subjectivism as there is actually something outside the private sphere on which the perceiver is co-dependent when perceiving.
Furthermore, there can be no illusions -- either private or collective. To grant illusions no existence is the logical implication of asserting that everyone’s perception is unerring knowledge. Protagoras has, thus, made Truth stand for relativized truth. It is not possible to perceive the object, only one’s own perception of the object is to be known. This is taken to the extreme at 158c-d where Socrates suggests that the examples of dreams, madness etc., show that “whatever a man thinks at any time is the truth for him.”. Perhaps we can here see some clue to why Socrates is not willing to let knowledge equal perception. Socrates says that the soul beliefs half the time that the dream-life is real and the other half that this world is real. The way he phrases it, “the result is that for half our lives we assert the reality of the one set of object, and for half that of the other set. And we make our assertions with equal conviction in both cases.”, seems to imply that we do not perceive reality but we, nevertheless, do assert it. It is crucial that we do not get knowledge through perception but still can superimpose a belief upon sense-data that something is true.
2.2 The notion of flux
The very formulation of perception arrives at the necessity of an ever changing nature, i.e., close to Heraclitus: “We ought, rather, to speak according to nature and refer to things as ‘becoming’, ‘being produced’, passing away, ‘changing;” (157b) The second theory is, thus, Heraclitus’s notion of constant flux. It states that everything is in movement and change. Crombie[i] points out that given that knowledge is perception, everything must be random -- in total flux -- as otherwise there will be something more than pure perception to know: constant relations between the objects and subjects. Thus knowledge cannot be chaotic; we need to impose the more stringent condition of it being stochastic. [chaos is a non-linear but deterministic system whereas if stochastic we have a fully random, non-deterministic system.]
The premise of Theaetetus, the epistemology of Protagoras, and the ontology of Heraclitus imply that the only reality is motion. “I am, relatively to you”, or as Plato has it “all things are coming into being relatively to something.” (157a). Furthermore, most importantly, the linking together of the three notions implies that the object of knowledge is perception: knowledge is immediate as perception is unerring to my world at the very moment of perceiving. (160d)
Turning to the end-section of the first part of Theaetetus, we will investigate Socrates’ reasons for opposing that perception constitutes knowledge.
The insufficiency of Theaetetus’ claim for knowledge
From the outline above, it seems clear that Theaetetus argues that apprehension, sense-perception, gives knowledge. Socrates, on the other hand, appears to state that knowledge requires comprehension. To look more closely at this, let us define apprehension as when seeing, you see what there is to see; that is, anachronistically, phenomenalism. The sense-organs do not change your perception. Implicit here is a subject-object dichotomy. Socrates’s reason for not believing that perception is knowledge was that failing to get at being, one fails also to get at truth; failing truth, one cannot know. (186c). Apprehension does not get at being. Only by comprehending the content of one’s apprehension, can one get at being.
By process of reasoning, we can comprehend the sense-perceptions. What is this being of the object that we have to know in order to comprehend -- is it Being as a Form, or is it the inductive generality as arrived at by expertise? To answer this, we will look closely at two contending readings of 184-86. Those are Cornford’s and Cooper’s. Cornford introduces Forms, whereas Cooper argues that it is a misreading of the Greek to see Being where Socrates only mentions being. In other words, where Cornford wants a transpersonal reality, the realm of Forms, to be the outcome of reason working on perception, Cooper is content with seeing reasoning as constructing order and logic within oneself.
First reading
The first reading introduces Forms into Theaetetus. Socrates says that there is a single form to which all sense-data converge, “something with which, through the senses, as if they were instruments, we perceive all that is perceptible.” (184d) This single form, psyche, makes it possible to relate two accounts of sense-perception which were perceived through different faculties; that is, to investigate the common features of two sense-impressions. Cornford is interpreting these common features as examples of Forms. In other words, Theaetetus’s list of common features (being-not being, likeness-unlikeness etc.) are not relations that the soul makes by reasoning and, furthermore, they are the only kind of objects of knowledge.
Firstly, Cornford concludes that perception is not the only possible instance of knowledge. The common features are also a source of knowledge.
Secondly, Cornford makes use of the very end of part one where Socrates reaches the conclusion that perception is not knowledge. The argument goes:
1. There are objects apart from sense-perceptions
2. These are the only real objects of knowledge
as a) you get at the being of things by way of soul
and b) if you don’t get at being, you don’t get at truth
and c) if you don’t get at truth, you don’t get at knowledge
thus d) knowledge is not in perception but in the reasoning about them and the result of the reasoning is the discovery of the common features.
Thus, Cornford argues that the soul working on itself arrives at knowledge, without use of sense-perception. The crucial distinction from the second reading is that Cornford wants the result of the soul’s reasoning, judgment, not just to be not a formalization and unitization of sense-data but the arrival at the level of Form.
Cornford argues that Plato still subscribes to Heraclitus: allowing Heraclitean flux you need something more than the sense organs, which are motions. If the soul is to get knowledge, it has to access something which is not conditioned by flux. Thus, you need the soul to have access to the Forms, which are unchanging and enduring. In fact, Cornford believes that Plato deliberately left out the Forms simply to show how hard, if not impossible, it is to philosophize without postulating them.
It was argued that we perceive through the sense-organs, not with them. This relativizes them to mere channels providing psyche with sense-data. Therefore, the senses cannot contain knowledge. They are merely a neutral black box through which the external world reaches the internal world, providing the link for the heterogeneous elements of knowledge.
That the sense cannot contain knowledge does not, however, exclude sense-perceptions from carrying knowledge of the object being perceived. Whether this is a possible reading or not hinges on how you read 186d. Cooper refers back to 186c1-2 and argues that “the experiences which reach the soul through the body” are implied in 186d, thus making it improbable that any kind of perceptual acts of mind can be knowledge.
Second reading
The second reading points out that the common features are products of psyche working on its own. Cooper says “What we are doing here is thinking something common to the objects of several senses, and Plato calls the predicates of such judgments ‘common terms’ ”.[ii] In this way, judgments turn out to be the only way of bringing together sense-perceptions from several different organs of sense. There is nothing in this part of the dialogue that alludes to the Forms. Besides, Plato is not hinting at the epistemology of perception; judgments are just, at best, intrapersonal objective declarations. The reading does without any sort of metaphysical framework.
That the soul gets at the Forms is rather irreconcilable with Theaetetus’s way of describing the process: “I think the soul examines the being they have as compared with one another. Here it seems to be making a calculation within itself of past and present in relation to future.” (186a-b) Whichever work of Plato you use for the theory of Forms, you will find that phenomena belonging to our time, space, and causality dimension are the main hindrances to access the realm of Forms. That this passage alludes to the same kind of being as the form Being seems, therefore, quite implausible. In this context, it is easy to interpret common features as related more to common sense (intuition+casual empiricism) than Forms. Knowledge is always in relation to something, i.e., we are here defining relative knowledge. Is not this exactly what Plato hints at when getting at the common features by relating to the past and the future? Remember, though, that this easily leads to “the most astonishing and ridiculous things” (154b) Just to get some kind of standard for these common features, Socrates exhorts to a “long and arduous development, involving a good deal of trouble and education.” (186c) Again, this can be seen as relating back to the discussion of expertise. Here it seems to imply that the expert is the one who is more abled to predict the future by forming concepts which are abstractions from this world’s three-dimensional contingencies. By putting it this way, the theory of Form is hardly explicit.
Personally, I think that Plato is, in this part of Theaetetus, more hinting at the value of careful definition than at the theory of Forms. In other words, Plato is not concerned with “how the mind acquires its knowledge of the common terms which it employs in its interpretative activity.”[iii] What could have been a discussion of how to acquire universal concepts is left out because the main point is how we can understand this world, using this world. It is important to remember that Theaetetus does not introduce metaphysics but actually argues about how to make sense of our senses and its impressions.
How does the second reading fit with knowledge being perception? Socrates asserts that it is impossible to get at knowledge if you don’t get at truth, and truth is impossible if you don’t get at being. That is, to get at knowledge, you have to get at being, ousia. Because perception only gets at the giveness (perception per se) of the sensation, sensory awareness does not assert the being of the object. To say that a thing exists, you use the reflective consciousness to make a judgment. Judgment thus gets beyond the sheer giveness of the object by applying expertise to pronounce how the object is, i.e., predicate it. Thus abstracting from the contingent environment the object is perceived in, one can get at a continuity which is assumed to reveal something about the nature, the being, of the object. Knowing the being of an object, one is able to identify it under any circumstances. Thus the being of an object is the unconditioned existence of an object, and as such unchanging.
Further, perception is subjective and it is only by reference to expertise that one can declare something true or false. Therefore, Socrates can declare that “knowledge is to be found not in the experiences but in the process of reasoning about them; it is here, seemingly, not in the experiences, that it is possible to grasp being and truth.” (186d). That is, Plato goes along with Protagoras and Heraclitus in describing perception but asserts at 187a, contrary to Theaetetus that we can reach knowledge only through judgment, not perception.
The second reading appeals to expertise instead of Forms. The result is the same, though, as perception cannot be knowledge. Here, perception fails on the reasoning that perception does not imply any objective standards. That is, expertise is needed to get at knowledge, as one has to reason, apply objective standards (expertise), to get at knowledge. As knowledge is unchanging and forever the same, it is only by abstracting, through reasoning, from particular environment, that you can get at the unchanging nature of an object and thus arrive at knowledge of the object.
Crombie seems to agree with the second reading when he suggests that perception per se is simply seeing and does not, by its very function, provide any propositions. Without propositions we cannot predicate and assert something as “true” or “beautiful”. Therefore, if we can have knowledge at all of this world it can only happen through an intermediary and this intermediary would be the faculty of doxa, the ability to pronounce judgments. What results from doxa is knowledge, episteme. So, it is not just high-flying knowledge that requires reasoning; just to know anything requires judgment.
Conclusion
Whether arguing for or against the object of knowledge being Form, perception is not enough. Personally, I would argue for Cornford’s standpoint. I think that Cornford is right in so far as he is seeing that the Forms have to be implied. However, I would not push the presence of the Forms as far as he does. They are neither explicit nor denied; by not asserting them Plato is just showing that the Forms are not his main focus in the Theaetetus. The Forms being in this way implied does not justify Cooper in letting the common features just refer to psyche, and never beyond.
Realism cannot help us to know the world; it can, perhaps, by randomness find relationships of predictive value; however, there is no foundation for this kind of “neural” knowledge. This lack of foundation, being, is the reason for Socrates having to disprove Theaetetus. Plato complemented Theaetetus with Protagoras and Heraclitus to bring out the vanity of finding a foundation inductively from a structure; only the reverse works where the foundation provides knowledge of the structure. Therefore, I would argue that expertise is not enough for knowledge and would not agree with Cooper in rejecting the parallelism with the Republic VII on the grounds that there Plato does explicitly use the theory of Forms whereas the Theaetetus does not.[iv] As mentioned above, the Forms are implicit here and thus there is a parallelism with the Republic. However, we do the Theaetetus a disservice by putting the Forms in the forefront. The main point of the Theaetetus is that perception alone is not enough to constitute knowledge; reasoning is a prerequisite for us to acquire knowledge of anything.
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