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- I ended the last section by saying, “I think it is now time for us to return to the text and to see how Socrates can manage to argue with someone who has put the foundation of justice beyond the reach of rational argument.”
Polemarchus quoted Simonides as having said that it’s just to give to each person what is owed. Now let us turn to Socrates’ response.
Socrates replies, “And surely it’s not an easy thing to disbelieve a Simonides, since he is a wise and godlike man; however, whatever it is that he means by this, you no doubt know, Polemarchus, but I’m ignorant of it.”
This is an example of the irony for which Socrates was famous. By that we mean that we probably don’t quite believe that Socrates is sincere in saying that he doesn’t understand; much less do we believe that he really thinks Polemarchus understands better than he does. But calling this irony may not be especially helpful here. Calling it irony focuses our attention on what is absent, on the lack of honesty or sincerity--perhaps on Socrates’ intention to speak over the head of the person he is addressing, for irony is most often employed for the benefit of a person other than the one spoken to. In this case I think we need to pay special attention to what Socrates is DOING.
The response that Socrates makes here is an example of a certain type of response that Socrates often makes. It is a distinctive and extremely powerful “Socratic” move, like a patented wrestling hold, and I think we should learn to recognize it. The key to it is simply this: Socrates responds to a positive assertion, not with agreement or disagreement, but by asking what it means. The asking of this question points to a decisive limitation on the power of authority.
Authority based on threats of force may be able to compel obedience. Authority based on common taste may be able to induce compliance without compulsion. But neither form of authority can compel, or induce, understanding. Therefore it appears that authority cannot compel or generate belief with respect to anything which is not self-evident, anything where understanding is required. If you doubt this, just imagine being ordered to believe that, “The universe is a stationary bound state of the Hamiltonian of infinite degrees of freedom.” (This is a paraphrase of a passage from a paper that my co-author Hitoshi Kitada and I published in 1996 under the title Local Time and the Unification of Physics. See http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0110065.pdf - p. 11.) I mean, if you were ordered to believe this sentence, you might be perfectly willing to say those words, and to state your assent to them, but unless you knew some of the math of quantum theory you would probably have no idea what the words meant. In that case, would it make any sense to say that you believed what you were saying?
In a conversation, asking “What do you mean?” or “What does he mean?” stops the action. You might say that it suddenly shifts the balance of power in a conversation. Before this question is asked, the speaker is making an assertion the meaning of which is obvious to him. He may anticipate disagreement or agreement, but he takes for granted that the listener will understand what he means. If he believes that he knows something which the other does not, he may count his knowledge as a strength and the other’s ignorance as a weakness. But with the asking of this question, “What do you mean?” the claim of ignorance and incomprehension suddenly becomes a source of strength in the conversation for the person making that claim.
In the previous section I argued that Polemarchus, by grounding his father’s conception of justice on a sentence by Simonides which Polemarchus deemed beautiful, was attempting to put the definition of justice beyond the reach of rational argument. Now we see that Socrates is trying to drag that definition back within the compass of rational argument by claiming not to understand what Simonides means — and thereby forcing Polemarchus to articulate his interpretation of Simonides.
Lance - Dear Lance,
Forgive my slowness to answer your long thoughtful responses.
You are correct, I do not understand Kant, but it can't actually be
said that I misunderstand him, because I have never studied him. I
responded only to your comment, and I did so facetiously (or
sarcastically) since I clearly do not believe in not giving examples.
Whether or not Kant agrees.
Whitehead has an enormous reputation due to his collaboration with
Russell, and also, I think, due to his very serious critique of
Einstein's theory of gravitation. He also has a reputation for
obscurity. Even Russell said he didn't understand him. I like to
form my own opinions, so looked into his "Science and Philosophy", and
formed my own opinion. The question in my mind about all these
fellows is whether it is worth the effort to get at what they are
saying? In the case of Whitehead, I really don't know, but suspect not.
As for Kant, you seemed to have learned something of value from your
teacher Prof. John Smith, who tells you what Kant means, or rather
what he thinks Kant means. That's nice. But if Kant meant that, why
didn't he say that? And if he didn't, and your professor, who has
probably spent a lifetime at it, gets it wrong, how do you expect to
do better? But if what you say Smith told you is true, I think you
could have figured it out for yourself anyway without reading Kant.
At least I did. (By the way, the orange juice squeezer metaphor
doesn't work well for me. Oranges are materials of sense, but so is
orange juice.) Now Einstein has some harsh criticism of Kant's
system, and that, together with his reputation for difficulty, and the
fact that I can figure out for myself what you say Smith says he
means, implies to me that he may not be worth the effort to overcome
his difficulties. But maybe I am wrong.
But this is my problem with all these fellows. Why should I burn up
valuable brain cells trying to understand what Kant is saying about
something, rather than burn out the same cells thinking about the
thing itself?
It seems to me there is a very good reason these fellows are not
clear. In the first place, it takes hard work to make yourself clear,
as you well know. Moreover, obscurity is, for many people, the mark
of wisdom. So, if I have nothing valuable to say, and am clear, I
will sooner or later be exposed, will I not? So between the two,
there is little incentive for them to be clear.
On the other hand, Descartes was generally very clear, but that was
part of his technique, certainly not because of any concern for the
reader. "I am tired of writing", he says, "so figure it out for
yourself. I have given you the method."
When I was a young man, I was very impressed with the writings of the
aforementioned Russell, who is, as you will admit, a remarkably clear
writer. But, having set aside his leftist views, I found that I had
not learned much from him. Indeed I think I learned more from
Pauli's footnotes. (You may not think of Pauli as a philosopher, but
according to Pais, in 1943 Einstein invited Russell, Goedel and Pauli
to his home on a half dozen occasions to discuss philosophy of
science.) Pauli is a remarkably clear writer, capable of describing
the most intricate ideas without in any way slurring over the
difficulties and problems. And he shows great wisdom, at least in
matters physical, even at that tender age. His description of Weyl's
theory, written at the age of 20!, is much easier to understand than
Weyl himself. (Weyl writes in the hectic, disjointed style favored by
many mathematicians. )
All that said, I think I will stick (mainly) to Plato.
And now let us turn to something more interesting.
The geometric proposition you mention (Euclid's Elements I,32) is not
a good example for the point you are trying to make. Euclid would
shoo (should that be "shew"?) you right out of class, saying that
protractors have no place in his system. To do what you want to do
would require the following: in a Euclidean manner describe the
construction of some particular triangle (a 2-3-5 triangle for
instance) and demonstrate that its three angles are either more or are
less than two right angles.
Finding such a counterexample would not likely be done with I,32 but
perhaps with some other proposition, because Euclid is not flawless.
His definitions are often defective and frequently lacking, so there
are inconsistencies and he does not always consider all the cases, so
there may be some case of the figure which he has overlooked and for
which the proposition is not true.
Are you under the impression that examples and counter-examples have
no place in mathematics? Bradly Bassler is a professor in the
philosophy dept. at UGA but holds a phd in mathematics. In a
discussion of retracting published theories in physics ( a rare and
somewhat embarrassing thing), he mentioned that retractions were very
common in mathematics. While we were picking our jaws up off the
floor, he went on to explain that, while modern mathematics has
methods of establishing the truth of a proposition with very little
doubt, these methods were far too tedious and time consuming to
publish. So modern mathematics proceeds from conjecture to
conjecture, leaving it to the author and readers to satisfy themselves
as to the truth of the conjectures. The most common way of refuting a
proposition is to find a counterexample to some conjecture. We were
astounded.
Now I wonder why you have not noted that Plato himself handles the
subjects we discuss very well in Theatetus? Socrates asks the young
Theatetus, what is knowledge? He responds with a list of examples.
Now this is a rather ordinary way of defining a word is it not? to
list various examples. Now Socrates offers a counter example:
suppose I am asked what clay is? Would I not look ridiculous, if I
answered with various KINDS of clay? So Socrates is looking for a
general way of defining words but the method of listing things is not
it. Theatetus quickly understands and offers an example of what he
thinks Socrates means. Theodoros has demonstrated something with the
numbers 3, 5 and so on to 17 where he runs into some problem and
stops. Evidently he is referring to the numbers other than 4, 9 and
16, because now Theatetus generalizes to "oblong" numbers and "square"
numbers. (Now the adult Theatetus is usually credited with proving
the General proposition, that an oblong number has no rational root,
but Plato doesn't actually say that because it happens some time in
the future.)
[ I cannot go on without mentioning Wilber Knorr's wonderful book [On]
The Evolution of the Euclidean Elements (the title is misleading
without the preposition) in which he offers a reconstruction of these
proofs and an explanation of the difficulty Theodoros ran into and why
2 is not one of the numbers proved by Theodoros. ]
But to return to your original point, and perhaps return the
discussion to something more on-topic, although I think the example
you gave was a bit confusing, I do agree that one cannot believe or
understand something just because I have been forced to say that I do.
But verbal assent is all that many people mean by "understanding"
and "belief".
Regards and Best Wishes,
Bob
Lancelot Fletcher lrfletcher@... [plato-republic] wrote:> PS on examples:
n together with the chapters at the end of the first critique -- especially the Canon of Pure Reason -- which happen to be much easier to understand than the beginning, except that most students give up before they reach them.
>
> You asked, if you refute an example, doesn't that refute the general statement that the example was intended to illustrate. I offered a counter-example in which the refutation of the example would not refute the general statement. But if you had offered the case of the "Form of the Good" and the image of the sun which Socrates uses as his example of it, I would acknowledge (and will demonstrate when we come to Book 7) that you would have a good case that the refutation of this particular example does at least call into question the general principle that it is supposed to illustrate.
>
> Lance
>
> On Jun 14, 2014, at 14:34 , Lancelot Fletcher <lrfletcher@...> wrote:
>
>> Dear Bob,
>>
>> About examples. I think there might be good reasons to question what Kant said about the use (or uselessness) of examples in philosophy. One reason (or example) would be that if you look at the arguments of Socrates as presented in Plato's dialogues you will find that they contain almost nothing but one example after another. Sometimes the examples, as in the Timaeus and the story about Er with which the Republic ends, are called "myths." Then there is the image of the divided line and the "cave allegory" in the Republic, and when we come to the point in Book 2 where Socrates and the Plato's brothers decide to build a polis, we will find that it is introduced only as an example or model of the soul by means of which Socrates hopes to make it easier to discover the nature of justice. Plato's dialogues, then, are filled with examples, and they also contain numerous instances in which the attention of the slow reader is called to the inadequacy of examples.
>>
>> At some point (when we come to Book 7, if not before) this inquiry about examples will force us to consider the relationship between Plato and the Pythagoreans. I mention this here because Pythagorean mathematics was founded on the use of stones to represent units of length, and the discovery which was at once the triumph and the scandal of Pythagorean mathematics -- incommensurable magnitudes -- proceeded from the realization that in many quite simple cases it is obvious that, if you represent the length of the legs of a right triangle by a certain whole number of stones, there is no way to represent the length of the hypotenuse by a whole number of stones of the same unit length. So this tension between examples and what thought is striving to reach has been a fundamental ingredient of philosophy from its beginning.
>>
>> See below for more comments...
>>
>> On Jun 8, 2014, at 18:04 , Robert Eldon Taylor philologos@... [plato-republic] <plato-republic@yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Lancelot Fletcher lrfletcher@... [plato-republic] wrote:
>>>
>>>> (In the preface to the second edition of
>>>> his first Critique Kant says that examples are generally not useful
>>>> in philosophy because if the reader understands the author's point
>>>> then the example is unnecessary, and if he doesn't understand the
>>>> point then the reader is likely to argue about the example and not
>>>> about the author's philosophical point.)
>>> Indeed he was correct. Just the other day I attempted to read some of es
>>> Whitehead's essays on science. Whitehead gives no examples, and I had
>>> no idea what he was talking about, so returned the book to the shelf,
>>> where, I suspect, it will be when I die.
>>>
>> I am not sure if you have understood Kant's point. You say that Kant was correct in saying that examples are NOT useful in philosophy, and then you give, as an example, your attempt to read a book by the philosopher Whitehead which you found unintelligible because of the lack of examples. But Kant, it seems, would have approved of what you say was the absence of examples in Whitehead's essays.. Also, just out of curiosity, which essays on science by Whitehead were you trying to read? I haven't read Whitehead since my undergraduate years, but Whitehead was popular at Yale when I was there and several of my teachers had studied with Whitehead, so I read a lot of his writings at that time and I don't remember noticing any dearth of examples in what I read.
>>
>>> But say, do I misunderstand? If you make a general statement, and
>>> give an example, and I refute the example, does that not refute the
>>> general statement. So why should I not attempt to refute the example?
>>>
>> Well, suppose I am trying to demonstrate the Euclidean theorem that for any triangle in a plane the sum of its interior angles is equal to two right angles, and as an aid to the demonstration I draw a triangle on the blackboard. And then you come up to the blackboard with your protractor, measure the size of the angles in my drawing and demonstrate that in fact the sum is not equal to two right angles. Does this refute the theorem?
>>
>>> And where, by the way, do you get your general statement, except by
>>> generalizing examples?
>>>
>> I am not sure what you mean by "generalizing examples." If you mean, "This has been observed to be the case in a large number of experimental trials, therefore I will propose as a law that it is always the case," I would say this this is only one source of general statements, and probably not the most important one. Models are probably a more fertile source of general statements than collections of statistics.
>>
>>> But perhaps I do not understand what you (or Kant) mean by "example".
>>> How do you actually separate the "philosophical point" from the example?
>>>
>>> I don't suppose you could give me an example could you?
>>>
>> I will give you an example, or perhaps an anecdote, not a very good one, but at least it involves Kant. Another of my teachers -- John Smith was his name -- said to me that he had found it was impossible to teach Kant without lying. What he meant, as he explained, was that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is such a difficult book to understand that he had found it practically impossible to teach the first part of the Critique without talking about it as if it was describing knowledge as a kind of orange squeezer, taking in oranges (materials of sense) at one end and, after some processing, turning out juice at the other end. But after all of that it was necessary to reveal to the students that this was not what Kant meant at all, and that the whole structure was built for the purpose of disclosing that the understanding was limited to the domain of possible experience, leaving room for freedom and faith, and this point was made by re-reading the preface to the second editio
>>
>> Lance
>>
>>
>>> Best, Bob
>>> p.s. that last sentence was a joke.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
>