ABSTRACT
Plato's epistemology, that is, his theory about the nature and possibility of knowledge, makes an important distinction between the sensible and the intelligible. The cave experiences stand for ordinary sense experiences, those that the unenlightened consider real. The things seen in sunlight represent ideas known intellectually. The difference between knowledge and mere opinion, along with showing the difference between real and unreal things, Plato described a line divided between levels of belief and levels of knowledge. The way to recover knowledge of the real is through reminiscence. Plato expressed his doctrine of innate knowledge and reminiscence in mythological terms, basing it on the notion of preexistence of the soul, which had access to knowledge before it was born into a body. In the Sophist, Plato defined error as 'thinking what is not'. According to Eleatic logic it would be impossible to think what is not, for that would give it a sort of being.
