ABSTRACT
So far we have to a large extent been concerned with arguments to show that episteme is impossible. These arguments have relied on the difficulty of producing areas where strict ‘is’-es are applicable. Plato thinks that he can isolate such an area, though the result is to agree with the sceptic that on most topics on which people claim episteme episteme is not in fact possible, and that in fact very few people if any have knowledge in any strict sense. The concentration on ‘is’, however, makes it possible for someone to counter-attack from a quite different direction. For just as good Greek for ‘believing the truth’ is ‘believing what is’ so good Greek for ‘believing what is false’ is ‘believing what is not’. One favourite sophistical argument was to claim that believing what is not is impossible, for it is equivalent to believing nothing which is just not believing at all. This verbal jugglery could be made to look more respectable as part of more elaborate positions, like that of Protagoras in the Theaetetus (cf. chapter IX), the outcome of which was to deny Plato’s contention that knowledge, while possible, is only for the few, and substitute an epistemological egalitarianism. No one, so far as I know, thinks that Plato ever believed that false judgements or statements are impossible, but there is room for disagreement over whether or not he at any point held a position that would seem to lead to that. Thus one possible view is that he was inclined to think of statements as complex names (cf. Crombie, 1962). Signs of this view can be seen in the Cratylus (422 seq.), where naming something is treated as describing and so making a statement about the thing named, and no distinction is made between naming Cratylus ‘Cratylus’ and saying that Cratylus is bald. The latter simply names the complex fact of Cratylus’ baldness. Part of Cratylus’ difficulty in the dialogue is that he thinks that if there is no Cratylus then the name is an empty noise that names nothing, and similarly if there were no such thing as his baldness, ‘Cratylus is bald’ would be an empty noise too. In other words, all false statements would have to be names of non-facts, or of nothing. We have here a way of viewing statements whose attraction can be felt and which would make the arguments to the impossibility of false statements seem more than just verbal play. In the Sophist Plato begins to fight his way out of this difficulty by distinguishing between. naming and stating. The function of naming is to fix the subject of a statement and falsity comes in in the misallying of the subject with a description. This only allows him to cater for a subset of false statements. It does not enable him to analyse the false ‘unicorns exist’. But there is worse. Plato was tempted to interpret ‘X is F’ as ‘X exists F-ly’, and so to read ‘X is not F’ as ‘X non-exists F-ly’. The subject/predicate distinction leaves this necessarily false or empty. If ‘X’ has successfully named something it is necessarily false, if ‘X’ has named nothing it is empty. Plato’s escape is to read all such statements as ‘X exists nonF-ly’. But now we get difficulties over the true ‘unicorns are not believed in by scientists’ which has to be read as ‘unicorns exist in an unbelieved in by scientists way’. This either makes ‘unicorn’ successfully name something non-existent, or implies a special mode of existence for what are vulgarly held to be non-existent entities. All this results from attach-
ing an importance to naming as an essential part of all statements that is hard to square with a review of a representative sample of statements, but is intelligible in someone who is struggling out of a position that statements and judgments are complex namings. Now the view that all words are names and propositions are complex names is one that goes well with a position that knowledge is a matter of being acquainted. Learning a name can plausibly, though erroneously, be represented as being introduced to the bearer of the name, and giving a name seems feasible only by someone acquainted with the nominee. To be acquainted with the nominee in a way sufficient for acquiring the name, one must be able to distinguish it from all other name-bearers, and then one has a grasp of this name as just and only the name for that nominee. This fits the way Plato talks early on about Forms: they have to be seen in pure isolation as just what they are, and then the reference of their names is understood in contrast to that of other names. This ambition is not compatible with the actual procedure of ‘giving an account’, which plainly involves non-isolation of Forms, and the Sophist shows Plato advancing to a propositional model of knowledge. The Cratylus and Sophist together mark this advance in his ability to cope with problems of falsity and negation. The Cratylus shows him in what is for him a real difficulty, and the Sophist shows the beginnings of escape partly by the distinction of subject and predicate and partly by important distinctions in the sense of ‘is’.
