Notes on the Meno

Meno is from Thessaly, an area to the North and West of Athens. His host at Athens is Anytus, one of Socrates' accusers. Later in his life, Meno was one of the leaders of a Greek mercenary force hired by Cyrus, a Persian who was fighting Artaxerxes, another Persian, for control of the Persian Empire. When Cyrus was killed at the battle of Kunaxa, deep in Persian territory, and the Greek mercenary force was left deep in enemy territory with no support, Meno betrayed the Greek leaders. As a result, the Greek leaders were killed by Artaxerxes. That left the Greek mercenary force leaderless. The story of their march back to Greece is recounted by Xenophon in the Anabasis (Xenophon was one of the Greeks on that expedition, and wrote about it on his return: he also wrote an Apology of Socrates.

The central question of the Meno is whether virtue can be taught. The three possibilities mentioned in the dialogue are that virtue is knowledge (and so it teachable), or is habit (and so is acquirable if not straightforwardly teachable), or a quality over which a person has no control (it is given "by nature" or "by god"). Of these, the idea that virtue might be a habit is not carefully explored.

A prior question to the teachability of virtue is what virtue is.

Importantly, in the Meno, Socrates treats some epistemological themes. At 71b, Socrates raises a paradox. The paradox, called Meno's Paradox, is as follows: how can I know anything about X if I do not know what X is? The classic formulation of the paradox is a dilemma: how can you search for knowledge of X? If you know what it is, then you have already got knowledge of it and cannot search for it. If you do not know what it is, you cannot search for it, because you do not know what you are searching for. If we take the paradox seriously, it raises huge problems, for it makes it impossible to come to know about anything. The problem is hard to take seriously outside of a philosophical context, but in philosophical terms, it may be fairly interesting. The paradox occurs again in the dialogue at 79c, and formulated most famously at 80d-e.

• This paradox marks a watershed in Plato between the earlier Socratic phase and the later Platonic phase: up until this point in the dialogue, the dialogue has looked a lot like the aporetic early dialogues. After this point, epistemology is explicitly discussed.
• This point is also important because this is the first point in the history of ideas where the possibility of gaining knowledge a priori is raised. The slave boy will learn not from experience, but from his own mental resources, it is argued.
• It seems so obvious that one can search for something as long as one has some specification of it that one wonders why this is a paradox at all. For instance, calculations show that there must be "dark matter" in the universe. We have no idea what or where it is, but we know that it has at least some qualities that are specified by our calculations. Or, to put it in primitive terms, if something is eating our clan members, we know that what we are looking for is a "human-eater," although we have no idea what it is aside from that. In fact, you cannot search at all unless you are searching for something, and to be something, a thing has to have some specification. Why didn't Plato just point to that?
• Parallel to Meno's paradox about how one can search for knowledge is a paradox about how one can search for a good teacher: if I do not know what good writing is, how can I search for a teacher of good writing?

Meno's attempts to define virtue are as follows: 1) virtue is different for every action and every age (71e-73c); Meno then agrees that there is some one thing that makes each case of virtue virtue, and suggests 2) virtue is ruling over people justly (73c-e). Socrates goes on a geometric interlude by way of illustrating to Meno the sort of answer he wants, after which Meno offers another attempt at defining virtue (77b-): 3) virtue is desiring beautiful things and having the power to acquire them. After a strange exchange, Meno admits that justice and moderation are parts of virtue (79a), to which Socrates replies that he wants the whole of virtue, not its parts.

After Meno's attempts at giving an account of virtue fail to satisfy Socrates, Meno accuses Socrates of being a torpedo fish (80a-b). That image is similar to Euthyphro's claim that Socrates makes ideas move around in circles.

At 80d, we have reached a point of aporia about the nature of virtue and indeed about the possibility of finding any knowledge about anything. As an attempt to get out of it, Socrates suggests that the soul is immortal, has learned and forgotten everything there is to know, and can be reminded of it. That is the famous Theory of Recollection. He also suggests a method, which he calls "Hypothesis." It is not the modern scientific method, however.

• Vlastos claims that there are two senses in which we can take the theory of recollection: in one sense, the "weak sense," it amounts to a claim that knowledge can be non-empirical, or attained a priori. The "strong sense" involves the claim that all knowledge is non-empirical, which leads to the theory of forms.
• It is important to notice that the theory of recollection tells us how we can "learn" things in this life, but it does nothing to explain how we can learn things period. How did we learn things wherever we did learn them? Or did we come into being with the knowledge? Is learning impossible?

The famous slave-boy episode is meant to illustrate how a soul can be reminded of its past knowledge (82-85). At 82e, the slave boy thinks he knows, but does not know, how to find the length of the side of a square double the area of any given square. At 84a, he has reached the point where he admits ignorance. By 85c, he has learned how to determine the requisite length.

Among the conclusions reached at the end of the slave boy episode is the claim that people have within them true opinion about things they do not know. True opinion seems to have solved Meno's Paradox: You do not need knowledge about what you are searching for. All you need is true opinion, even if it is mixed up with false opinion. The theory of recollection guarantees that the soul has within it true opinions. Sufficient conversations about a topic can lead to knowledge! (85d)

• Has the theory of recollection and true opinion solved the problem? If you have a memory of or true opinion about the thing, then you do not need to search for it, because you have it. That seems fine, as far as it goes. The problem is that it just puts off the paradox to true opinion or memory. How can you search for true opinion about something if you don't have true opinion about it? How can you remember something if you don't have a memory of it? Either you have the memory or the true opinion already, or you don't. If you don't, you can't search for it, because you don't have a true opinion or memory (or knowledge) of what it is.
• The sufficient conversations element is interesting: it seems to imply that knowledge is simply a matter of engraining true opinion so deeply into yourself that it is no longer capable of being swayed: it has been tied down so thoroughly by argument that it will not shift. But if argument is the means of tying it down, why could not argument move it? The "true" part of it becomes most important, and how you "know" that it is "true" becomes the problematic area.

The end of the Meno resumes the search for virtue and whether or not it is teachable. Meno directs Socrates to ask whether it is teachable rather than the question Socrates thinks is prior, namely what virtue is, but Socrates seems to examine what it is anyway.

In the course of conversing with Anytus and Meno, from 92 on, Socrates suggests that virtue cannot be knowledge, because of the lack of teachers. If something is knowledge, there are generally people who can teach it. Of all the people held up as examples of virtue, none of them managed to hand on their virtue to their sons reliably. And yet, if they had taught it to anyone, it would surely have been their sons. Hence, Socrates concludes, their virtue was not knowledge.

Socrates suggests that true opinion serves as well as knowledge (97). Socrates tries to differentiate true opinion from knowledge. This is explicit epistemology. Socrates suggests that true opinion is flighty, and will not stay in place. Knowledge, however, is stable and cannot be moved.

A question occurs to me about the end of the Meno. I am wondering, namely, why Socrates thinks that virtue comes from the gods to humans if he believes in the theory of recollection. It seems to me that recollection could have been used as a possible explanation for why some people have true opinion. There is no need for gods, unless the gods are somehow the things that are recollected.