ABSTRACT
THE passages from the Theaetetus and the Cratylus which have been studied in the two preceding chapters were chosen with a view to providing really close parallels to arguments in the Euthydemus since, as was stated in the introduction, this seemed to be a good way of establishing a few strong cases for the thesis of conscious use of fallacy in Plato. In the present chapter, I propose to diverge from this procedure slightly, and to go to a dialogue which, although it employs one of the fallacies pro minent in the Euthydemus, equivocation, does not make use of exactly the same terms. (That is, the equivocations in the Euthydemus were primarily on 'learn' and ' i s ' ; here they will be on 'good' and 'voluntary'.) It might as a result be argued that the use of fallacy in the Hippias Minor is not necessarily con scious, since Plato might well be aware of the ambiguity of some terms but not of others. On the other hand, there appears to be independent evidence in the Hippias Minor that the equivoca tions here are in fact consciously used, so that in this case there is no need to invoke the principle of a precise parallel with arguments in the Euthydemus. The Hippias Minor may therefore be regarded as a dialogue which extends the range of equivo cations which Plato seems to have employed consciously, and also as strengthening the case for the more general thesis of conscious use. Certainly we can again see that the study of fallacy leads us directly to a number of the really critical philo sophical problems in Plato's thought.
