Plato’s Epistemology

In this stimulating book, Jessica Moss aims to show that Plato’s epistemological project is “radically different” (6) from what one might expect if exposed only to the contemporary epistemological scene. Moss’s main thesis has two distinct but related parts: first, about Plato’s key epistemological concepts; second, about the motivation behind Plato’s epistemology.In conceptual terms, Moss sees the principal contrast for Plato not as one between knowledge and belief, as those terms might be understood in a contemporary context, but between a superior cognitive state (epistēmē) that gives its possessor “a deep grasp of ultimate reality,” and an inferior one (doxa) that represents “superficial thought that fails to penetrate beyond appearances” (85). In motivational terms, Plato’s epistemology is to be located within a fundamentally ethical project, such that being in a state of epistēmē “constitutes living well” (139).Mediating, as it were, these epistemological and ethical levels is Plato’s metaphysics. According to Moss, in some important texts Plato distinguishes between a world of Being, represented principally by Forms, and a world of Becoming or Seeming, represented principally by perceptible things. In thus defending a “Two Worlds” (TW) reading of Platonic metaphysics, Moss also seeks to vindicate what she calls a “Distinct Objects” (DO) view of Platonic epistemology: epistēmē is of Being alone; doxa is of Seeming alone.In the main TW texts that she considers, and especially the central books of the Republic, DO encompasses the thesis that epistēmē is of Forms alone, doxa of perceptibles alone. Indeed, in these sorts of Platonic context, Moss pushes things a bit further: Platonic epistēmē and doxa are defined by their relation to their respective objects (17) and moreover, on a “like-by-like” principle, derive their contrasting qualities (e.g., that epistēmē is stable, doxa unstable) from the similarly contrasting qualities of the objects that they are defined by (70–71).As Moss freely admits, and documents in some detail, exegesis of Plato in this spirit was pretty much standard for over two millennia, only losing ground in the scholarly community with the onset of readings inspired, to a greater or lesser degree, by Gail Fine’s influential assault, in the late 1970s, on a DO construal of Republic, book 5. Although Fine’s thesis was controversial from the outset, Moss’s book is perhaps the most systematic attempt in analytic scholarship on Plato since then to uphold and reinforce a DO reading. How successful is the attempt?Before airing some criticisms, let me emphasize that Moss is surely onto something. It is hard not to share with her, and those millennia of interpreters before her, the sense that in certain Platonic texts we get something like a TW view; and that in the central books of the Republic we are presented with a framework that looks awfully like it restricts epistēmē to Forms and doxa to perceptibles. But of course, in scholarship, the devil is in the detail. In ranging over a large part of the Platonic corpus, Moss is at times avowedly sketchy, for example in getting to grips with the somewhat bewildering variety of contrasts that relevant dialogues seem to deploy in marking off Being as a distinct metaphysical category.Given, however, that she seems to regard the middle books of the Republic (5 through 7) as somewhat privileged for her interpretation—Moss speaks of reading the Platonic corpus as a whole, epistemologically speaking, through the “lens” of the TW dialogues (207, 233) and, among these, the central books of the Republic receive her most sustained analysis—one wishes at times for a bit more nuance. As those familiar with the debate that Fine provoked may somewhat wearily acknowledge, there tends to be a pattern: skeptics about DO have to discount parts of the text that look DO-oriented; defenders of DO need to account for passages that seem to tell against it.Moss does not entirely escape the clutches of this standoff, dismissing DO-threatening passages as “loose, awkward, or ... ambiguous” (192), apparently for no better reason than that they fail to square with DO. Skeptics will, one suspects, be unconvinced. My aim here, however, is not to adjudicate between camps, but to point to two systemic issues that I think may be responsible for Moss’s own failure at times to satisfyingly break free of the impasse.The first is that she engages with, but I think underplays, a particular aspect of how the Platonic dialogues are written: each is a self-contained work with its own set of interests. A dialogue substantially concerned, as the Republic is, with the question of how a city should be ruled, and which proffers the radical thesis that one needs knowledge of Forms to rule a city well, might be expected to allow for the possibility that the perceptible realm that is to be ruled should serve as an object of epistēmē. For how could philosophers make a difference if, in spite of their rule, that realm remains resolutely the object of mere doxa?There is plenty one might say in response. Moss herself accounts for the passage at 520c, that could be read as meaning that philosophers have epistēmē of perceptibles (and which Fine took as a major textual strike against DO), as not needing to be understood that way. I am in sympathy with Moss’s approach. Yet, in a work so carefully written, it is hard to avoid the thought that Plato could easily not have put such suggestive words in Socrates’s mouth. Given that he does, the text seems to leave room for readings (ones that Moss mentions but rather brushes over) that allow, for example, epistēmē to be paradigmatically of Forms and doxa of perceptibles while each is also able to grasp the other’s paradigm objects.So too, with doxa of Forms. In the political context of the Republic, we might think that removing Forms from the reach of doxa risks impeding access to the higher cognition of Forms that is needed, for political purposes, in the philosophers’ embodied lives. One has to start somewhere; and the idea that we simply leap to epistēmē in our embodied grasp of Forms might seem implausible. Skeptics, at any rate, are unlikely to have their doubts allayed by Moss’s dismissal of Socrates’s apparent allusion to doxa of a Form (506d–e), in the midst of a stretch of text supposedly targeted at denying such a thing, as “Plato ... loosening his terminology” (191).Let me turn to the other systemic issue that I think affects Moss’s reading. Despite the refreshing way she contrasts Plato’s epistemological concerns with those of contemporary epistemology, Moss seems to me to remain in one respect a little too much in the grip of the latter. Contemporary epistemology tends to have a broadly dyadic structure, distinguishing between knowledge and belief (or a particular variant thereof such as true belief). In striving to construct a commensurable frame for contrasting Platonic and contemporary epistemology, Moss at times does not quite do justice to the rather different structure that we actually find in the epistemological arguments of the Republic’s central books.The book 5 argument is triadic, not dyadic: epistēmē is of what is, doxa of what is and is not, ignorance of what is not. Beyond the occasional hint (e.g., 165) that ignorance is of “nothing,” Moss has little to say about this third element of the triad. And that seems to me unfortunate, since any reading that purports to capture the distinctiveness of Platonic epistemology should be able to illuminate this aspect of it. Moreover, in broad outline, a reading that construes, as Fine’s does, the cognitive states of Republic 5 as being related to propositions rather than objects can make decent sense of the structure: ignorance relates to what is not the case, as belief relates to what is and is not the case (there are true and false beliefs) and knowledge to what is the case (knowledge is factive). Such an analysis needs refinement to fit the details of Plato’s text. But Moss’s own near silence on the issue risks an opposition win by default and her project falling short on its own terms.If the triadic structure of the Republic 5 argument is played down by Moss, then the fourfold structure of the Line in Republic 6 receives a good deal of analysis. But in tackling the notoriously obscure second-highest section of the Line—the realm of thought (dianoia)—Moss seems to me no more successful than other interpreters have generally been in wrestling it into a DO format. Indeed, the text’s placing in the dianoia section, as images, the selfsame perceptible objects that feature in the next lowest section as originals, and its claim (at the same time) that those with dianoia “grasp Being to some extent” (533b; cited by Moss at 185 and 194)—Being principally referring to Forms—seems designed to confound even the fiercest partisan of DO. It is telling, I think, that Moss describes her procedure for identifying a distinct metaphysical object of dianoia as being to “sketch how one could fill out the details in order to construct an interpretation of dianoia that conforms to the constraints of objects-based epistemology” (188).As with Moss’s treatment of passages that threaten Forms with taint by doxa, so too the motivation for her reading of dianoia seems essentially that it conform with DO. But why should one want it to do that? Because, according to Moss, one is already constrained by the objects-based epistemology one finds, presumably, in (at least) the book 5 argument. Yet it is by no means obvious, even if Moss’s reading of that latter argument is correct, that this should constrain how one reads the Line. Why, after all, treat the book 5 argument as authoritative in that regard? It is set up as dialectical, mounted with the very particular purpose of persuading the lovers of sights and sounds that their cognitive state is doxa rather than epistēmē, whereas the Line looks to be part of Socrates’s own official view of the structure of cognition and its relation to reality.There is no reason why one should seek to impose a rigid DO framework on all four sections of the Line just because one finds it in the simpler structure of the book 5 argument; no reason, in particular, why one should not take the objects of dianoia to manifest some overlap with those of doxa or epistēmē, even if objects of doxa cannot be objects of epistēmē and vice versa. Given that Moss’s DO reading of the Line is constrained by a presentation of the book 5 argument that treats it to all intents and purposes as dyadic in structure, one is left with the impression that such a structure captures something canonical about the structure of epistemology. That may be a view to be gleaned from contemporary epistemology; it is not, I think, one shared by Plato.In the end, then, Moss’s book has the resources to distance Plato from the structure of contemporary epistemology rather more radically than it does. For reasons I have sketched, such distancing may create extra challenges for a DO reading. Whether or not Moss succeeds in converting those disposed to some less stringently separatist account of Platonic epistemology than the one she advocates, hers is nonetheless an important contribution to the separatist cause. Indeed, for the most part, the book is far from doctrinaire: packed with argument and written in a pleasingly dialectical style. Moss has the gift of anticipating objections just when readers familiar with the contours of the debate are likely to be raising them for themselves. Plato’s Epistemology is sure to spark further debate about Plato’s epistemology

Context (archaeology) · Doxa · Epistemology · Metaphysics · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Philosophy