Part 2: Knowledge as True Belief
If you are interested in Plato read Plato. This is just restating the views of Robin Waterfield who translated and wrote an essay in the version I have.[187a-201c] Having shown that knowledge cannot be perception Socrates asks Theaetetus for his next answer to the question what is knowledge. Theaetetus responds that knowledge must be true belief. In order to explore this new birth, Socrates embarks on an investigation into false belief. How can false belief arise? In the model of the sophists false belief is impossible because knowledge is perception. Plato is convinced of the common sense view that it is of course possible to hold a belief that is wrong or unfounded in some way but he isn't convinced he can show why. Later, apparently, in Sophist his thoughts are clearer.
This paradox of false belief has it that if everything is either known or unknown how can false belief arise. Socrates dismisses [188e] intermediate states of knowing, learning and forgetting as irrelevant. I think he is again trying to pitch himself against the strongest defence of the impossibility of false belief. False belief about something known is a contradiction and false beliefs about something unknown is impossible. So from where does it arise?
Plato gives a complicated account of how different combinations of knowing some object a in the sense that you are perceiving it at the moment (Pa) and have memory or knowledge of it from a previous experience (Ka). If you throw in a second object b you can be perceiving them both now, knowing them both but not perceiving them. Whitefield points out that he misses a few of the combinations and has one or two appear twice. Say Pa-Kb and Ka-Pb where a and b are say two people you know or don't know, you know one but are meeting the other for the first time and so on.
Cross belief
He first comes to the possibility of false belief arising in cases where something like knowledge of a and b are mixed up. He calls this cross belief. Borrowing from Whitefield its like a French man having learnt the English word for apples is potatoes. In what sense is he wrong when he insists there are potatoes in the cart?
Wax block
He then compares the mind to a wax block. Perhaps hard or soft or mixed with impurities (reference to Homer and hairy chests). How do false beliefs arise if we imagine a hard wax block not easily engraved but equally not easily erased. And then there are softer blocks; easily impressed and just as easily forgotten.
Bird cage
Now come pigeons in bird cage minds. You may possess them but you might not have them to hand. You might go in after a wood pigeon and come out with a town pigeon.
All three lead him back to where he started - really quite difficult to explain how false belief arises. However all is not lost because he has a neat argument for why true belief cannot be knowledge. It involves lawyers convincing the jury of the truth or falsity of the allegations. They get persuaded says Theaetetus. They may come to have true beliefs about the case but they were not there to be eyewitnesses and so do not know the facts of the case. Knowledge of something can't be the same thing as a true belief about it.
Does Plato reject the possibility of false belief because he doesn't have access to the language and words needed to distinguish knowledge of the identity of something from knowledge concerning propositions about the thing identified? Probably he was on the cutting edge of the distinction being thought and communicated. Perhaps he stretched language like a rubber band until it could fit around the concepts he was wrestling with.
Is this type of reading of Plato this missing the point and veering off down the path of analysis as opposed to poetry? I don't really know. Since reading this I've read three short dialogues; Euthryphro, Apology and Crito and found them to be profoundly moving. They bring into me a reverence for fellow human beings in the things they can think and be. Many people know the line 'the unexamined life is not worth living' but to read it in context is something else.
