While Plato’s Meno is ostensibly about ethics since it discusses virtue, it is also about epistemology, i.e. the theory of knowledge. Written in 385 BC,[1] the plot is about a man, Meno, who is talking to Socrates about the nature of virtue. Meno wanted to know if virtue can be taught, gained through practice or is inborn. Defining concepts
Socrates responds that Meno has leapt ahead with that question since to make sense of it, we have to first figure out what virtue even is. Socrates thinks no one knows either. Meno suggests that virtue in a man consists in the ability to “manage public affairs, […] help his friends and harm his enemies.”[2] In a woman, it is to manage the household well and submit to the husband. He thinks for other categories of people like the elderly, children and slaves, other virtues apply. Socrates points out that Meno is giving different instances of virtue but just hearing examples of virtues are not enough to tell us what virtue is. To know that something is an example of a category, we first need to know what that category means, since otherwise, how would we know the example fits? This is known as the problem of the criterion, though Plato does not explicitly call it that.
There must be something common among these examples, that give them the form of virtue. Returning to Meno’s example, Socrates asks if by good management, does it include managing with moderation and justice? Yet justice is not the same as virtue but once again is an instance of a virtue. We need to find out what all instances of virtues have in common, to put our finger on what virtue is. What is the form or essence of virtue?
Meno suggests another possibility of what virtue might be: “Virtue is to want all the best things in life, and to have the power to get them.” In response, Socrates asks: do people want bad things and if they do, is it because they do not realise that the things they want are bad and thought instead that they are good? It is out of ignorance that they choose bad things, since bad things are harmful, causing misery, and no one wants to be miserable and unhappy.
Next, Socrates examines the latter part of Meno’s statement, about power and whether virtue is the ability to get good things. First, he asks what Meno means by good things. They agree some examples of good things are health, wealth and honour. They also agree that to obtain the wealth, it must be done with justice, moderation, piety and other elements of virtues. If one failed to obtain wealth because there was injustice involved, then that in fact is virtuous. Hence, it is not having wealth that is virtuous but the elements of virtue such as justice, which brings us back to having to define virtue as a concept, as a whole.
Knowledge as Recollection
Together, they come to realise another problem with gaining knowledge: “He cannot search for what he knows since he knows it; there isn’t any need to look for what’s not lost. Nor can he search for what he does not know; for then he does not know what to look for,” says Socrates rephrasing Meno. However Socrates does not agree with this statement, since he thinks that when we learn, we are simply recollecting. According to him, the soul is immortal, and already knows all things but we forget, and so we need to search and learn, so as to recollect.
To demonstrate this, Socrates enlists the assistance of Meno’s slave, taking him through a process of reasoning about a square and then another square with double the area of the first. At first the slave was confident that the second square would simply have double the lengths of the sides of the first but as Socrates continues to interrogate him, he realises that he is mistaken. According to Socrates, now that the slave realises he does not know, he will want to find out instead of being over-confident about things he does not know. Socrates then continues to guide him to a solution but claims that the slave is simply expressing his own opinions which all along had been within him. The slave was simply stimulated by Socrates’s questions, or in Plato’s terminology, recollecting.[3] From this, Socrates also believes he has proven the immortality of the soul since the truth about reality is there in the soul, which it can only have gotten if the soul was living immortally.
Method of Hypothesis
Socrates next uses the method of hypothesis to try to answer Meno’s question on whether virtue can be taught, despite not yet having defined the concept. What sort of thing must virtue be in order to be teachable or otherwise? For virtue to be teachable and learnable, it needs to be a kind of knowledge, since only knowledge can be taught and learnt. Hence the key question is: is virtue knowledge? Socrates propose to hypothesise that virtue is the good-in-itself. If there are good things that aren’t knowledge, then virtue might not be a kind of knowledge.
Virtue makes us good. A good person is one who does good. The earlier examples of good things were health, strength, beauty and wealth. But these things can also sometimes be harmful. For instance, courage without being mindful is recklessness and confidence when not mindful can become over-confidence. Socrates suggests that if virtue is in the soul and is good, then it must be related to mindfulness, which is to think in advance of action, i.e. the opposite of thoughtlessness.
They next discuss if the virtuous or the good are good by nature, i.e. is virtue inborn? Socrates believes not though his argument is fallacious: he argues that if it was inborn, we would try to identify such children, lock them up and guard them to prevent their corruption so that when they are mature, they can be of use to the city. He implies that since that is not done, hence it is not inborn but that is a non-sequitur, i.e. his conclusion does not follow from the premises.
Since goodness is not inborn, then does it come from learning? This might hold if virtue is knowledge but Socrates doubts this premise since he cannot find any teachers that can teach virtue. He claims to have searched, so he is making an empirical claim. The sophists do profess to teach virtue for a fee but according to a new person entering the dialogue, Anytus, the sophists are a plague and corrupt their students. What the sophists do teach their students are how to be confident when giving answers, even on things they do not really know about, i.e. to be “clever speakers.”
Anytus instead think that “any Athenian gentlemen” would suffice, for they had learned from other good men before them, such as their fathers. Socrates argues against this, pointing out examples of sons of Athenians that had not managed to learn the virtue of their fathers, though they had successfully learnt other skills such as horseriding from them. Surely the fathers would want the sons to be good men, but yet seemed unable to teach them virtue, though they were able to teach other skills. Hence, Socrates empirically proves that virtue cannot be taught.
Knowledge and True Belief
If virtue isn’t knowledge and hence cannot be taught, can people then be guided to do good? Socrates makes the distinction between knowledge and true belief. Prior to Edmund Gettier in the 20th century, knowledge was thought of as justified true belief. In Meno, Socrates proposes that one who has a true belief is as good a guide for action as one who has knowledge. However, “the man with knowledge will always succeed whereas he who has true opinion will only succeed at times,” says Socrates. He compares knowledge to the statues of Daedalus, who is a sculptor whose works are so realistic that if they were not tethered to the ground, they would run away.[4] True belief is like an untethered statue of Daedalus, “they don’t hang around for long, they escape from a man’s mind.” However, if they are tethered, “with chains of reason,” they will remain in memory. So true belief, justified by reason, becomes knowledge, in line with the justified true belief criterion for knowledge. Hence knowledge is more valued than only true belief.
Relating it back to virtue, since virtue is not knowledge, we might still learn of it as true belief. Both knowledge and true belief are acquired, and not innate. Hence “men are not naturally good,” asserts Socrates. Since virtue is neither innate nor learned, Socrates concludes that it is a “free gift from the gods,” since he cannot otherwise account from where it can come from. He is arguing by exclusion, though thinking that the gods are the only remaining possibility is fallacious.
Conclusion
Disguised as a work on ethics, the Meno is really a work on epistemology. Since the interlocuters did not quite arrive at a definition of virtue, though Socrates did hypothesise that virtue is the good-in-itself without arguing for it, the Meno is not quite successful at extending our ethical knowledge. However, it emphasises the importance of beginning with defining the concept under study, highlights difficulties in such definition such as the problem of the criterion and puts forward Plato’s theory of knowledge as recollection. He demonstrates the use of hypothesis as a method and concludes by discussing knowledge as justified true belief. The Meno has its flaws, with Socrates making several fallacious arguments and disappointingly does not finally define what virtue is. However, it is performative as a text on epistemology, with Socrates demonstrating why a theory of knowledge is needed to study ethics.
Bibliography
Plato. Meno. T ranslated by J. Holbo and B. Waring, 2002.
Pritchard, Duncan. What Is This Thing Called Knowledge? Third edition. London: Routledge, 2014.
[1] https://iep.utm.edu/meno-2/
[2] Translation used: Plato, Meno, trans. J. Holbo and B. Waring, 2002.
[3] A re-enactment that clarifies the geometry is found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqDoLdmcyZo
[4] Duncan Pritchard, What Is This Thing Called Knowledge?, third edition (London: Routledge, 2014), 14.
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