Friday, February 23, 2018

Platonic Epistemology

A platonic epistemology holds that our ability to know something as defective is dependent on there being a perfect thing of its kind which we, at least implicitly, know, and thus which we can compare the defective thing to. Thus, to know that a line is crooked, we must know some straight line well enough to compare the crooked line to the straight one and thereby see that the crooked line is unlike the straight line.

In language, the meaning of a term is given in part by the possibility of using a different term to mean something else. That is, there is a contrastive element to meaning. The term 'dark' contrasts with the term 'light', and the term 'crooked' contrasts with the term 'straight'. Platonic epistemology takes this to apply to knowledge, too. So far, so good. If there could be no circumstance where the use of a term would be inappropriate, it would be, like, meaningless.

Platonic epistemology takes a further step however. It claims that the term on at least one side of any spectrum must have a referent. Thus, a platonist would claim that for 'light' to have meaning there must be a perfect light, and that for us to use the term 'light' perfectly, we must somehow know this perfect light. This strikes me as implausible and otiose. We do not need a perfect light to understand what darkness is, or even what imperfect(ly bright? or white?) light is. We do not need to know perfect equality to recognize near-but-not-quite equality. We simply need to recognize that there are conceivable cases which would be more equal, brighter, whiter, etc., and conceivability need not entail actuality. It need not even entail possibility.

The puzzle for any platonic epistemology is to explain how we come to know the perfect things. Given that they do not seem to need to appear in the world of sensation, it is unclear where we are supposed to have learned them. On any theory where we know what perfect goodness, truth, and beauty are like, it would have to provide a merely implicit knowledge, since otherwise one cannot account for disagreement. Plato's theory was that we were alive in the world of the Forms before we were born. Christian Platonists hold that the perfect things are ideas in the mind of God. I am only really interested in the latter.

In order to fill the role which perfect things are supposed to fill in a platonic epistemology, ideas in the mind of God would need to be made accessible to us in some manner. One way would be for God to immediately transfer them into our minds. Another way would be for us to, as it were, look into the mind of God instead of a platonic heaven of ideas. In either case, we are presumed to walk around with implicit knowledge of perfection of various sorts waiting to be triggered by seeing things in the world which relate to them.

But if we are presumed to walk around with mere knowledge of such things, then the need for the perfect things per se seems to have dropped out. Why not dispose with the perfect things, at least as a criterion of being able to recognize imperfect things, and just leave the implicit knowledge? If one does this, then one is back at the point where one has a conception of more white, etc., and since one has already granted that the knowledge involved is implicit, one may go a further step and suppose that the implicit knowledge is not conceptual knowledge but rather embedded in one's perceptual and cognitive capacities. That is, perhaps we do not so much know what it would be like for something to be whiter, as we have a visual system which can simulate varying degrees of whiteness and represent this degree of whiteness thus and so. Likewise, the visual system may simply process visual stimuli in such a way that we recognize straightness as a norm embedded in how we perceive, rather than as a concept to which we must compare lines. It is notable in this respect that there is variation in what different people recognize as perfection of different colors.

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