the highest form of knowledge is empathy essay

The Heartbeat of Humanity: Deciphering the Essence of Empathy

This essay about the profound essence of empathy, portraying it as a vital force shaping human connections and societal dynamics. It emphasizes empathy’s role in fostering understanding, compassion, and solidarity across diverse domains, including healthcare, education, and social justice activism. Through empathic engagement, individuals bridge the gaps of isolation, cultivate inclusive communities, and advocate for justice and equity. Empathy emerges as a guiding principle that enriches human relationships, inspires positive change, and nurtures a more compassionate and interconnected world.

How it works

Empathy, akin to a subtle melody woven into the fabric of human existence, reveals itself as a beacon illuminating the pathways of connection and understanding. Its essence, akin to a delicate dance of emotions, transcends the confines of language, culture, and circumstance. To unravel the intricacies of empathy is to embark on a journey of profound discovery, one that unveils the depths of human consciousness and the power of compassionate resonance.

At its core, empathy emerges as a radiant force, igniting flames of understanding and solidarity amidst the tumultuous landscapes of human relationships.

It is more than a fleeting sentiment or a fleeting act of kindness; rather, it embodies a profound recognition of the shared human experience, where joy and sorrow intertwine, and the boundaries between self and other blur into insignificance. In essence, empathy serves as a bridge that spans the chasm of isolation, inviting individuals to traverse the terrain of emotional connection and forge bonds that transcend the constraints of individuality.

The tapestry of empathy, woven from the threads of understanding and compassion, finds expression in myriad forms across diverse domains of human endeavor. From the hallowed halls of healthcare institutions to the bustling corridors of corporate boardrooms, its presence permeates every facet of societal interaction, shaping attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes in profound ways. Within the realm of healthcare, empathy emerges as a guiding principle, informing the practices of physicians, nurses, and caregivers as they navigate the complexities of human suffering and healing. Through empathic engagement, healthcare professionals not only alleviate physical pain but also tend to the emotional and spiritual needs of their patients, fostering a sense of dignity, respect, and trust in the healing process.

Moreover, empathy assumes paramount importance within the realm of education, where it serves as a cornerstone of effective teaching and learning. Educators endowed with empathic attunement possess a unique ability to connect with their students on a deeper level, fostering a nurturing environment where curiosity is cultivated, creativity is unleashed, and potential is realized. By recognizing and validating the diverse experiences and perspectives of their students, empathic educators create inclusive learning communities where every voice is heard and every individual is valued.

In the realm of social justice and activism, empathy emerges as a powerful catalyst for change, inspiring individuals to advocate for the rights and dignity of marginalized communities. Through acts of solidarity, compassion, and allyship, empathic individuals challenge oppressive systems and work towards building a more just and equitable society. By bearing witness to the struggles and triumphs of others, they amplify marginalized voices, dismantle barriers to inclusion, and foster a culture of empathy and understanding.

In conclusion, empathy stands as a testament to the boundless capacity of the human spirit to connect, to understand, and to uplift one another in times of need. It is a guiding light that illuminates the darkest corners of the human experience, offering solace, compassion, and hope in the face of adversity. As we cultivate empathy within ourselves and within our communities, we sow the seeds of a more compassionate and inclusive world, where understanding reigns supreme and the bonds of human connection transcend the barriers of fear and division.

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Empathy: What Is It and How Does It Work Essay

Introduction, the meaning of empathy, what it takes for one to express empathy, empathy in the society, empathy in the study book, how important is empathy, works cited.

Empathy is a virtue that is associated with human beings. It can be said to be one of the virtues that separate caring and uncaring people. This article examines the meaning of empathy in general. It shows what it means to have empathy as a human being. Empathy is also examined from the context of the book Do androids dream of electric sheep. The context of the story in this book reveals, in a special way, how empathy can be and cannot be expressed. The effects of expressing and not expressing empathy are also looked at. Over expression is specifically pointed out as being unhealthy.

Empathy has been defined as the ability to identify with a situation that another person is going through. It has also been defined as the ability to experience another person’s feelings (Empathy 1). When a person identifies with another person’s situation and tries to alleviate or mitigate the stressing factor in the situation, then one can say that he or she is expressing empathy. Acts of empathy may therefore include such actions as giving food to the needy in the society or providing shelter to those who are homeless. Generally, empathy has much to do with acts of kindness directed to people faced with situations which are hostile. It is kindness directed to people who need it based on how the donor or the person giving has perceived the situation at hand (Vincent 10).

The feeling of empathy comes up when there is a clear difference between the person being empathetic and the one who is the subject of empathy. Generally, two persons in the same unfortunate situation may not manifest empathy feelings towards each other. This is because of undergoing the same situation and neither of them may be in a position to help the other. But if two people are experiencing different unfortunate circumstances at the same time, they may be able console each other thus they may show empathy to each other. For instance, a bereaved person may show empathy to another person who has lost his or her house to fire.

Empathy can be examined as a feeling that pushes a person to do something good for another person particularly when the other person is in a bad situation. Basically, for one to express empathy therefore one needs to have feelings. One has to feel and be touched by what others are going through. Because empathy is just but a feeling, it does not really cost much, at least financially, to feel empathetic. However, acts of empathy may cost some resources depending on individual acts in question (Thagard 15).

What it takes to express empathy is therefore the ability to have the feeling first such that there is identification with the situation at hand and then being in a position to offer the help required in whole or in part. Empathy has to do with feelings and in cases where a person’s feelings have been hardened; empathy may not be manifested easily. A good illustration is those that propagate violence especially the leaders (Thagard 15).

Empathy can only be expressed between two person or more. For empathy to be expressed, one party (one person or persons) has to be in a disadvantaged or hostile position in order for the other to offer some assistance. It is worth noting that acts of empathy or helping others who are a hostile situation or in a position that need assistance should be on a voluntary basis. If one is coerced to help another person then such an action may not pass as an act of empathy. Empathy therefore has significantly to do with the willingness to help out of one’s own volition or free will.

There are many ways in which empathy can be expressed in the society. More often than not, people in the society are not endowed equally and therefore there are some who are less privileged. One way on expressing empathy therefore is by lending a hand to those who are less privileged. One way in which this can be done perfectly is through visiting children homes. Most of the children in these homes are orphans. By spending time with them, playing and talking with them, they get the feeling of being cared for. This is important as it enables them to develop self confidence. Apart from spending time with them one can gift them with items such as clothes.

One may also express empathy to the sick especially those admitted in hospitals. Patients admitted in hospital are more likely to undergo psychological distress especially because of being away from family members. Expressing empathy in this case can be done through a word of encouragement. Words of encouragement as gestures of empathy will also work well in a family setting especially when one of the members has been faced with an unfortunate situation, for instance, falling sick.

The study book Do androids dream of electric sheep depicts in a clear manner the meaning of empathy and how it is applied. The book starts by setting the conditions right for the empathy to be exercised. The whole world is destroyed and only a handful of living things survive. Human beings as well as animals are left vulnerable and in a state where they need each other. Empathy in this book is shown as a biological trait which no android, even the most intelligent, can imitate. This is because emotions cannot be programmed into a computer (Dick 1).

I am of the view that it is the human beings who are the subject of empathy in this book. This may sound reversal but taking into consideration the joy and satisfaction that humans get from keeping animals, it turns out to be true. To keep an animal is prestigious and those who cannot afford animals are forced to find pleasure in keeping electric animals. This act of keeping electric animals as seen in the book can only point out to the fact that humans have some desire within themselves to offer care that if not satisfied disturbs them. Animals come in to satisfy that need by accepting to be cared for by the humans.

Technically, as the animals are being shown empathy by being cared for they are also playing a major role of showing empathy to humans by allowing themselves to be cared for. Indeed in the book, empathy is viewed as a two way traffic action whereby one party is willing to show empathy to another party and the other party is willing to accept the actions of empathy advanced by the first party.

Empathy is a vital virtue to human beings. It can be said to be among the virtues that help to make the society better. As was noted in the book, empathy differentiates us from machines. It gives us the kindness that makes human beings different from animals. Empathy also helps to unite people as they identify with one another in various struggles that they undergo (Waal 1).

Although it has been generally agreed that empathy is important, there is a caution that it should be expressed carefully in some cases. Caregivers need to express empathy when attending to patients. However, it has been noted that expression of empathy too much may make the patients vulnerable to be hurt (Hojat 12). Too much expression of empathy in such a scenario may also make the patients feel that their situations are dire. Such a feeling will obviously do more harm than any good (Eisenberg 1).

Empathy has been viewed as the ability to identify with a situation that another person is undergoing. Empathy significantly has to do with feelings. Empathy is shown when a person is in an unfortunate situation that may need consoling. In most cases, empathy propels a person to do something about the situation in question. The feeling of empathy will therefore push one into action, however in some cases there are no actions which might be done. Therefore, empathy does not change because one has not responded to the prompt to act.

It has also been discussed that it only takes feeling to have empathy. Since one does not need to act in order to show empathy, it can be argued that almost every person can express empathy. Those who may not display empathy are those who have hardened their emotions. Showing empathy has a positive effect on those who receive it.

Empathy consoles them and psychologically strengthens them to keep on fighting. This is especially the case for patients. However, it has also been cautioned against too much expression of empathy as it may create the impression that a person is in such a desperate situation that he or she might not recover. This will psychologically affect the person in a very negative manner.

Dick, Philip. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep . New York: Orion, 2010. Print.

Eisenberg, Nancy. Empathy and Its Development . New York: CUP Archive, 1990. Print.

Empathy. Empathy vs. Sympathy . DIFFEN, 2013.

Hojat, Mohammad. Empathy in Patient Care: Antecedents, Development, Measurement, and Outcomes . New York: Springer, 2007. Print.

Thagard, Paul. The Brain and the Meaning of Life . New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010. Print.

Vincent, Steve. Being Empathic: A Companion for Counselors and Therapists . New York: Radcliffe Publishing, 2005. Print.

Waal, Franz. The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society . New Jersey: Crown Publishing Group, 2010. Print.

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1. IvyPanda . "Empathy: What Is It and How Does It Work." May 7, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/philosophy-of-empathy/.

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Director of Inquiry Blog: Practicing Empathy

As the school year comes to a close, our teachers have been reflecting with their students on the learning and growth that has developed over the past eleven months. While a lot of this learning is able to be captured through documentation and written reflection, there is a great deal of learning happening every day which is not as apparent. Sometimes this learning gets overlooked because it is seemingly invisible. But its effects are some of the most elemental building blocks of education and personhood. In this brief blog, I want to focus specifically on the skill of empathy because empathy in action is a critical part of being in community and having a caring relationship with oneself and others.

In Empathetic: An Unappreciated Way of Being, psychologist Carl Rogers writes that being empathetic is: “To be with another in this way means that for the time being you lay aside the views and values you hold for yourself in order to enter another’s world without prejudice. In some sense it means that you lay aside your self and this can only be done by a person who is secure enough in himself that he knows he will not get lost in what may turn out to be the strange or bizarre world of the other, and can comfortably return to his own world when he wishes. Perhaps this description makes clear that being empathic is a complex, demanding, strong yet subtle and gentle way of being.”

Rogers is pointing to the individual strength and fortitude which is necessary for empathy to blossom within an individual. But as the innovator of person-centered practice (and the developer of our understanding of child-centered learning), Rogers reminds us that empathy is not merely an innate characteristic, it is ultimately learnable. In the same book, he writes: “An empathic way of being can be learned from empathic persons. Perhaps the most important statement of all is that the ability to be accurately empathic is something which can be developed by training.” 

The active engagement of this training is a critical component to who we are as a school and how we learn to relate to and with each other. But over the summer, kiddos make new friends, build novel communities, and often have larger chunks of unstructured time. These are all important elements of rest, relaxation, and renewal — kiddos need these just as much as we do. How can we help them to continue building their empathy muscles within different relationships and structures? One way to continue this training is to help them to understand the difference between empathy and their opinions.

In his commencement speech at San Francisco University High School, educator Bill Bullard pulled from quotes attributed to Plato and George Eliot to dissect the relationship between opinion and empathy when he wrote: “Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge; it requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge, according to George Eliot, is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound, purpose‐larger‐than‐the‐self kind of understanding.” 

A focus on maintaining accountability and understanding is an excellent way to continue building empathic abilities with your kiddo. It also helps them to realize that their personal opinion of a situation is always in relationship with a bigger, empathetic response which is just as important. This begins with us as adults demonstrating those skills in action and continues through the ways in which kiddos mirror those skills back to us. How might we show children what it looks like to be accountable to others? How might we demonstrate “profound, purpose‐larger‐than‐the‐self kind of understanding”? 

I find that empathy, much like other ways of being, is difficult to have a conversation about with children because it is best lived, embodied, chosen throughout the thousands of tiny decisions we all make every day. Kiddos learn by doing and this summer is an opportunity for you to do empathy for and with your little ones. If you’re looking for a more concrete discussion of the idea, here’s Mark Ruffalo explaining empathy on ‘Sesame Street’ . 

Whether you’re off to a summer adventure far away or in your own backyard, supporting empathetic children is one of the best ways to spend this differently structured time together. Start by demonstrating accountability and purpose and then find ways to invite your child into the same process. I bet you’ll be surprised by the depth of care they’re holding inside. Nurturing it now will help them blossom into a “complex, demanding, strong yet subtle and gentle way of being.”

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Empathy Key Origin: The Ultimate Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Knowledge

By   Joshua Turner

September 7, 2023

Empathy is often described as the highest form of knowledge . It is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. This quote has been attributed to many people throughout history, including Plato. However, its origins are difficult to trace, and it is unclear who first coined the phrase.

Empathy  is a complex concept that has been studied extensively in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience . It is closely related to compassion, which is the desire to alleviate the suffering of others. Empathy is often seen as a prerequisite for compassion, as it allows us to understand and connect with the experiences of others.

In recent years, empathy has become increasingly important in fields such as medicine, law, and education, where it is seen as a crucial skill for building relationships and promoting understanding.

Key Takeaways

• Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person.
• The origins of the quote “the highest form of knowledge is empathy” are unclear, but it has been attributed to many philosophers throughout history.
• Empathy is closely related to compassion and is increasingly important in fields such as medicine, law, and education.

Origins of the Quote

The quote “The highest form of knowledge is empathy” has been attributed to various individuals throughout history. However, the origin of the quote remains uncertain, and it has likely evolved over time and has been used by numerous people.

Regardless, the most commonly cited source is Bill Bullard , who said,  “Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.”

While the exact origin of the quote remains unclear, it has gained popularity in recent years and has been used in various contexts, including education, psychology, and leadership. The sentiment expressed in the quote has been endorsed by many people who believe in the power of empathy to bring people closer together and achieve success in business and life.

While the quote “The highest form of knowledge is empathy” has been attributed to various individuals throughout history, its origin remains uncertain. However, the sentiment expressed in the quote has been endorsed by many people who believe in the power of empathy to bring people closer together and achieve success in various aspects of life.

Understanding Empathy

Empathy involves comprehending and genuinely sharing the emotions experienced by others. It is often considered the highest form of knowledge because it allows us to connect with others on a deeper level.

Psychological Perspective

From a psychological perspective , empathy is a complex process that involves both cognitive and affective components. The cognitive component involves understanding the emotions of others, while the affective component involves feeling the emotions of others.

Empathy is linked to a variety of positive outcomes, including increased prosocial behavior , improved relationships, and better mental health.

Cultural Perspective

Culturally, empathy is valued in many societies as a way to promote social harmony and understanding . However, the expression of empathy can vary across cultures.

For example , in some cultures, it may be more appropriate to express empathy through nonverbal cues, while in others, it may be appropriate to express empathy through verbal communication .

Understanding empathy is crucial for building strong relationships and promoting social harmony. By recognizing the importance of empathy from a psychological and cultural perspective, we can create a more empathetic and understanding world.

Empathy in Philosophy

Empathy is an essential component of philosophy. Plato and Aristotle both believed that empathy is the foundation of all knowledge and that it is essential for ethical behavior and social responsibility. The importance of empathy cannot be overstated, and it is essential for developing a compassionate society.

Plato’s View

In philosophy, empathy is considered the highest form of knowledge. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato believed that empathy is the ability to understand the emotions and perspectives of others.

He believed that empathy is essential for human interaction and that it is the key to achieving harmonized society. Plato’s Academy  in Athens was based on the idea that empathy is the foundation of all knowledge.

Aristotle’s Perspective

Aristotle, another ancient Greek philosopher , also believed in the essence of empathy. He believed that empathy is a necessary component of ethical behavior and that it is essential for understanding the emotions of others.

Aristotle believed that empathy is essential for developing virtues such as compassion, kindness, and generosity. He also believed that empathy is necessary for developing a sense of community and social responsibility.

Empathy and Knowledge

Empathy is a powerful form of knowledge that enables us to connect with others, gain new insights, and challenge our own assumptions. By practicing empathy, we can expand our understanding of the world and the people in it, and we can develop more effective strategies for thinking and problem-solving.

Empathy as a Form of Knowledge

Empathy is often thought of as an emotional skill , but it is also a form of knowledge. It involves understanding the experiences, emotions, and perspectives of others. Empathy enables us to connect with others on a deeper level, and it is an essential component of social and emotional intelligence . When we practice empathy, we learn about the world and its people.

The Role of Empathy in Gaining Knowledge

Empathy plays a critical role in gaining knowledge. When we approach a situation with empathy , we are more likely to understand the perspectives of others. This understanding can lead to new insights and ideas that we may not have considered otherwise.

Empathy also helps us recognize and challenge our biases and assumptions, which can limit  our thinking and prevent us from gaining new knowledge.

Empathy is particularly crucial in fields such as psychology, healthcare, and education, where understanding the experiences and perspectives of others is essential. By practicing empathy, we can learn about the human mind and behavior and develop more effective strategies for helping others.

Empathy in Art and Literature

Empathy in music.

Music has the power to evoke emotions and c reate a sense of connection  between the listener and the artist. Many musicians use their music to express empathy and connect with their audience.

For example , singer-songwriter Adele’s album “ 21 ” is a powerful expression of empathy for heartbreak and loss. The album’s songs, such as “Someone Like You” and “Set Fire to the Rain,” resonate with listeners who have experienced similar emotions.

Empathy in Books

Books can transport readers to different worlds and allow them to experience the lives of others. Many authors use their writing to express empathy and create a sense of connection with their readers.

For example , the memoir  “Educated” by Tara Westover  is a powerful expression of empathy for those who have experienced trauma and abuse. Westover creates a sense of understanding and connection with her readers through her writing .

Empathy in Authors

Many authors are known for their ability to express empathy and create a sense of connection with their readers. For example, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  is known for her novels that explore issues of race, gender, and identity. Her writing creates a sense of empathy and understanding for those who have experienced discrimination and prejudice.

Empathy in Genres

Certain genres of literature are known for their ability to express empathy and create a sense of connection with readers. For example, memoirs and biographies  often explore the lives of others and create a sense of understanding and empathy. Fiction can also be a powerful tool for expressing empathy and connecting with readers.

Empathy in Goodreads

Goodreads  is a platform that allows readers to connect with each other and share their thoughts on books. Many readers use Goodreads to find books that express empathy and create a sense of connection with others.

Goodreads also provides a space for readers to share their own experiences and connect with others who have had similar experiences.

Empathy in Literature New Releases

New releases in literature often explore issues of empathy and connection. For example, Brit Bennett’s novel “The Vanishing Half ” explores issues of identity and connection between family members. New releases can be an assertive tool for expressing empathy and creating a sense of connection with readers.

Empathy and Compassion

The practice of empathy and compassion.

Empathy and compassion are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Compassion is the desire to lessen other people’s suffering, whereas empathy is the capacity to comprehend and experience another person’s feelings. The practice of empathy and compassion involves actively listening to others, putting yourself in their shoes, and responding with kindness and understanding.

This can be achieved through mindfulness meditation, which helps to cultivate empathy and compassion by focusing on the present moment and developing a sense of connection with others.

The Power of Empathy and Compassion

Empathy and compassion have the power to transform individuals and communities. When we practice empathy and compassion, we are more likely to act in ways that benefit others, which can lead to positive social change.

Empathy and compassion can increase  prosocial behavior, reduce prejudice, and enhance well-being . We can create a more benevolent world by practicing empathy and compassion.

Empathy and compassion are essential components of the highest form of knowledge. By practicing empathy and compassion, we can better understand others and ourselves and create a more compassionate world.

Empathy in the Modern Age

Empathy in the digital age.

In this age of technology, it’s easy to get lost in the digital world  and forget about the importance of empathy . However, empathy is still crucial in the digital age . It’s important to realize that behind every screen is a human being with their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

By practicing empathy, we can better understand others and connect with them on a deeper level, even if we’re communicating through a screen.

Empathy and Social Media

Social media can be a potent tool for empathy, but it can also be a breeding ground for negativity and hate . It’s essential to use social media mindfully and with empathy.

We should strive to use social media to connect with others, share our experiences, and learn from different perspectives. Doing so can create a more empathetic and understanding online community.

In the current times, empathy has emerged as the pinnacle of knowledge, holding greater importance than ever before. In this digital age, we must practice empathy online and offline. By doing so, we can create a more compassionate and understanding society.

Empathy is the highest form of knowledge, as it allows us to understand and connect with others on a deeper level. When we practice empathy, we become more unified as a society and can experience a more joyful and fulfilling life . Mindfulness plays a crucial role in developing empathy, as it allows us to be present and fully engaged with those around us.

Empathy is not merely a skill but a way of life . It requires us to be open-minded and willing to see things from another’s perspective. By practicing empathy, we can create a more compassionate and understanding world.

Empathy is the key to unlocking a more fulfilling and meaningful life. It allows us to connect with others on a deeper level and experience the joy of human connection. So let us all strive to be more empathetic and, in doing so, create a more unified and compassionate world.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. who said, ‘the highest form of knowledge is empathy’.

The quote ‘The highest form of knowledge is empathy’ is often attributed to Bill Bullard. However, it is important to note that the quote’s origins are unclear and may have been misattributed.

Q. What does ‘The highest form of knowledge is empathy’ mean?

The quote implies that empathy is a valuable trait and a form of knowledge surpassing other knowledge types. It suggests that understanding and relating to others on an emotional level is essential to gaining a deeper understanding of the world.

Q. How is empathy related to knowledge?

Empathy allows us to understand the experiences and perspectives of others, which in turn can lead to a deeper understanding of the world around us. By putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, we gain knowledge that we may not have been able to access otherwise.

Q. What is the significance of empathy in philosophy?

Empathy has been a topic of interest in philosophy for centuries. It is often seen as a key component of ethics and morality, as it allows us to understand the impact of our actions on others. Additionally, empathy is seen as an important tool for gaining knowledge and understanding of the world.

Q. Can empathy be developed and nurtured?

Yes, empathy is a skill that can be developed and nurtured over time . While some individuals may naturally possess higher levels of empathy, everyone can enhance their empathetic abilities through intentional practice and self-reflection. Engaging in perspective-taking exercises, active listening, and empathy-building activities can contribute to the cultivation of empathy.

Q. How can empathy be applied in real-life situations?

Empathy can be applied in various real-life situations, such as conflicts, negotiations, and interpersonal relationships. By actively listening, seeking to understand others’ perspectives, and responding with empathy, we can navigate challenging situations with compassion and build bridges of understanding.

Empathy also plays a crucial role in healthcare, education, and social justice, promoting fairness, inclusivity, and improved outcomes for individuals and communities.

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Empathy and Morality

Heidi L. Maibom (ed.),  Empathy and Morality , Oxford University Press, 2014, 303pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199969470.

Reviewed by Karsten Stueber, College of the Holy Cross

Having the ability to empathize with another person seems to be a good thing, even a morally good thing. If asked to choose between two worlds distinguished only in respect to the existence of empathy among humans, most of us would probably choose the one where empathy exists. In light of those intuitions, which we assume to be widely shared, it seems to be rather surprising that within the Western philosophical tradition empathy as the focus of a sustained intellectual debate has existed only since the 18 th century when moral sentimentalists like David Hume and Adam Smith argued for the centrality of empathy, or what they then called sympathy, in constituting moral agency. Their appreciation for empathy within the moral domain has, however, not been universally shared. More recently, even philosophers sympathetic to the sentimentalist project have voiced their skepticism in this respect (Prinz 2011a and b). For them, empathy's positive reputation within the moral domain is highly overrated, particularly in light of the results of decade-long empirical research on the relationship between empathy and moral phenomena.

Accordingly, Heidi Maibom's anthology is a very welcome and timely publication. Together with its useful introduction, which tells us "almost everything" we "ever wanted to know about empathy," its twelve contributions from a multiplicity of disciplinary perspectives (including philosophy, social psychology, psychopathology, neuroscience, anthropology and ethology) outline how we should think about empathy's contribution to moral and pro-social motivation, its contribution to moral judgment, and, more generally, its role for our social and moral life. Even if one at times would have liked a more detailed description of some of the empirical research that the various authors refer to, the anthology provides an excellent and comprehensive orientation about a topic that is at the center of the contemporary discussion about moral psychology and philosophy. The anthology should become something of a first address to "visit" for anybody wanting to familiarize themselves quickly with the state of the art research on and stances towards a rather complex topic. Nevertheless, it needs to be emphasized that the contributors mainly address the question of how empathy causally contributes to moral agency and moral judgment. They do not, with one partial exception, address the question of whether empathy plays a role in constituting or allowing us to understand the normative demands that moral judgments express and make on us. I will come back to this at the end of my review.

Since the anthology is not divided into sections I will briefly summarize and discuss each of the contributions by using mainly disciplinary criteria and thematic similarities among the various contributions. The anthology starts with three essays by well-known researchers in social and developmental psychology. Daniel Batson provides an astute and clear summary of his complex view of the relation between empathic concern, altruism and morality, which he has described more extensively in his earlier book (2011). As Batson's research has ingeniously shown, empathic concern does indeed give rise to genuine altruistic motivations that have the welfare of the other person as its ultimate goal. Yet as has also been shown such altruistic motivation should not be understood as motivation necessarily oriented or concerned with moral principles, nor is it necessarily concerned with the good of the larger community. Rather altruistic motivation activated by empathic concern is directed at the welfare of an individual. Therefore, it might override our commitments to moral principles of fairness and justice or to what is best for the community at large when those principles conflict with the welfare of an individual. For that reason, Batson distinguishes strictly between altruistic motivations and motivations guided by moral principles (principlism) or guided by the good of the collective (collectivism).

In contrast to Martin L. Hoffman (2000) he therefore does not regard empathy intrinsically to be able to strengthen our motivations for abiding by moral principles. Rather as he suggests at the end of his article, to harness the motivational force of altruism for morality requires further orchestration. In this context one wonders whether such orchestration might be helped by what Hoffman refers to as our mature ability to empathize not merely with individuals but also collectives. Moreover, Hoffman's contribution "Empathy, Justice and Social Change" complements Batson's suggestions by providing concrete means of thinking about such orchestration. As the potential final stage of his well-known developmental conception of empathy, which he briefly summarizes, Hoffman speaks nowadays of witnessing, a mode of empathizing with another person's or people's trauma that fully commits us to helping and alleviating the source of this suffering. More concretely, pointing to examples from the history of abolitionism (Harriet Beecher Stowe), the civil rights movement (Lyndon Johnson), serfdom reform in Russia (Turgenev) and various cases before the Supreme Court, Hoffman shows how empathy and empathy narratives have helped us to live up to the ideals of justice in the political and the legal realm. Yet Hoffman is fully aware of the limitations and biases of our natural empathic capacities. Nevertheless given empathy's positive influence in the real world (rather than its possible limitations revealed in the restricted environment of the psychological experiments) Hoffman continues to view empathy as the "bedrock of morality, the glue of society" whose power needs to be harnessed for the good of society.

Tracy L. Spinrad and Nancy Eisenberg round up the perspective from developmental and social psychology by surveying the empirical research and positive evidence for the causal correlation between empathy and pro-social behavior. They caution, however, that such correlation might also be due to a "third variable", such as our ability to regulate our emotions. Ultimately they suggest that further research on the contributions of genes and culture is needed in order to fully understand the nature of the correlation between empathy and prosocial behavior. Batson's skepticism about a direct link between empathy and morality is furthermore strengthened and echoed by the contribution of Giuseppe Ugazio, Jasminka Majdandžić, and Claus Lamm who also focus on empathy from a neuroscientific perspective. For them empathy, defined as involving the sharing of an affective state, is best understood as serving an epistemological role in the moral context. It allows us to gain information about the manner in which an event or action might affect a person emotionally.

Two contributions address the relation between empathy and morality from the perspective of research on psychopathology, particularly psychopathy and autism. Since both conditions are commonly associated with deficits in empathy, they have been a central focus of the discussion about whether and how empathy contributes to morality among empirically minded philosophers. Abigail A. Marsh ("Empathy and Moral Deficit in Psychopathy") provides a succinct and very helpful survey about the at times rather contradictory and confusing evidence regarding psychopaths' moral deficits. She suggests, the moral deficit of psychopaths is best understood as being related to their deficit in feeling fear and a correlated empathic deficit in recognizing and picking up information about the fear-related distress of other people. It is for that reason that psychopaths' moral deficits manifest themselves particularly in cases that focus on an individual's suffering harm. Their responses to the Trolley cases are, however, not that different from normal subjects because in those vignettes the people on the track and their suffering are barely the focus of our imaginative and empathic attention. Marsh then admits that we need to do further research in order to fully understand the moral deficits of psychopaths.

R. Peter and Jessica A. Hobson's discussion of empathy and autism ("On Empathy: A Perspective from Developmental Psychopathology"), in contrast to much of the recent discussion about morality, does not take experiments about moral judgment as the gold standard to evaluate our moral capacities. Rather, and I think importantly, they focus on empathy and its underlying mechanism of what they call "identifying-with" as a developmentally early and non-conceptual ability to "experience persons as persons" (174). It is an ability they take to be at the foundation for the developmentally later capacity to understand other persons conceptually as people with minds (different from standard accounts of mindreading proposed by simulation or theory theorists) and "critical in the development of a moral sense toward other feeling human beings" (179). As they argue persuasively in light of the results of various experiments, autistic children tend to view others from the outside without intuitively grasping their inner life. R. Peter Hobson does indeed deserve credit for being one of the researchers who has put the focus within the debate on social cognition and theory of mind on non-conceptual capacities that ground our interpersonal relations. It would interesting to see whether Hobson and Hobson's essay could produce a similar reorientation within the study of morality, where the focus has been on studying deficits in moral judgments. Moreover it would be interesting to devise further experiments to test whether and how deficits in interpersonal relations observed in people with autism as described in this essay manifest in irregularities of their moral judgments.

In "Empathy in Other Apes", Kristin Andrews and Lori Gruen seem interested in a similar reorientation of the debate by attempting to make us rethink the notions of empathy and morality and their application to chimpanzee societies. They point out that there is sufficient evidence for the claim that chimpanzees possess the capacities of cognitive empathy and perspective taking in that they are able to grasp the intentions and the visual perspective of other apes, even if they do not have a metacognitive grasp of another person's or ape's beliefs. They also suggest that chimpanzees can be understood as adhering to social norms of cooperation and fairness. However, such norms are best understood as being indexed to the quality of relationships, that is, cooperation is understood differently between a close kin and between strangers. They propose that the question of the morality among apes should not be approached presupposing Kantian notions of autonomy and pure reason but from perspectives that view the ethical realm as essentially situated and embodied.

All of this is indeed highly suggestive but also in need of much more detailed elaboration. For example, even Aristotelians who vehemently oppose the Kantian outlook on ethics and autonomy still seem to think that the ability for self-reflection and ability to tell stories about oneself is an essential characteristic of virtuous and ethical agents. One would also like to know which notion of social norms Andrews and Gruen are presupposing in their account. In the philosophy of social science, anthropology and sociology, for instance, there has been a long tradition of discussing this issue and one popular (but not necessarily uncontroversial) account analyzes social norms in terms of mutual expectations (and mutual knowledge of such expectations) of members of groups (Bicchieri 2006). One wonders, however, whether such understanding of norms could be easily applied to the animal kingdom. I must also admit I was a bit puzzled by their notion of entangled empathy and would have liked to have gotten a better grasp of how exactly it differs from notions of empathy otherwise appealed to in the literature and the contributions of this anthology.

In this respect, Douglas Hollan's illuminating contribution might be particularly helpful. Hollan develops his own account of empathy in light of notions already developed within the context of the theory of mind debate. He favors a notion of complex empathy distinguished from more basic empathic processes that emphasizes the cultural situatedness of empathy and the fact that it is always informed by awareness of cultural contexts. Moreover, from an ethnographic perspective the question of the importance of empathic knowledge for social cognition and morality is an open one. Indeed, as he shows in his own study of cultures from the Pacific area, the scope of empathy is always culturally modulated. Hollan points also to the ambivalence that certain Mayan or Inuit cultures have towards empathy, since they perceive it also as a means that can be misused. Empathy might, for instance, be used as an instrument to maintain class hierarchies rather than as an inspiration for human goodness. From that perspective, empathy appears to be a rather "fallible form of moral orientation" (248) and its moral benefits crucially depend on the manner in which it is conceptualized and talked about within particular societies. Accordingly, one might surmise that the close relation that philosophers from the 18 th century onward postulate between morality and empathy might be a culturally constructed one; a construction guided by a certain conception of morality.

The anthology also contains a very practically oriented yet theoretically sophisticated discussion about "Psychological Altruism, Empathy, and Offender Rehabilitation." Focusing on practices of sexual offender rehabilitation, Tony Ward and Russil Durrant suggest that it is better to appeal to the broader notion of altruism failure (in light of Philipp Kitcher's conception of psychological altruism) rather than empathy failure. Ultimately, deficits in empathy are only one of the many causes of altruism failure manifested in sexual offenses. In order to be effective, offender rehabilitation needs to address all causes of such failure.

So far then, most of the authors are relatively restrained and cautious in ascertaining a link between empathy and morality. They certainly do not seem to view empathy as the sole foundation of morality or the sole cause for moral behavior, since they admit that the scope of our natural empathic abilities is limited. As is well known, empathy seems to be easier for us when we perceive the other person to be closer or similar to us on a variety of dimensions. Yet within various philosophical traditions there have certainly been suggestions of how to "correct" empathy in a manner that allows us to conceive of it as at the very heart of human morality. In this vein, in their essay, K. Richard Garrett and George Graham argue for the possibility of what they call "sufficient empathy" that would constitute the "empathic center of our moral lives" and human happiness. Taking their inspiration from Buddhist teachings they suggest that striving for sufficient empathy has ultimately to be understood as a lifelong pursuit of trying to free us from our psychological attachments. In light of the anthology's cover art (a photograph of a statue in a Buddhist temple in Shanghai), this is certainly a suggestion that deserves further exploration. In particular, it is to be asked how a Buddhist conception of compassion and empathy associated with a "no self" conception is compatible with a Western conception of empathy presupposing a strict separation of self and other.

Squarely within the Western tradition, Antti Kauppinen addresses some of the perceived "shortcomings" of empathy in his richly argued "Empathy, Emotion Regulation, and Moral Judgment" by utilizing the resources of traditional moral sentimentalism. Following Hume and particularly Adam Smith (whose Theory of Moral Sentiments has seen something of a philosophical Renaissance in recent years), Kauppinen argues that if we understand empathy as the basis for our causal judgments we have to conceive of it as being regulated by the ideal perspective. To morally judge another person -- and Kauppinen seems here to follow very closely Smith's account of merit and demerit -- requires empathizing with the reactive attitudes of the various persons relevantly involved and affected by the actions of a particular agent from such an ideal perspective. I strongly agree with Kauppinen that contemporary sentimentalists, regardless of whether they are defenders (i.e. Michael Slote 2010) or critics (i.e. Jesse Prinz) of the moral significance of empathy have indeed insufficiently appreciated this aspect of traditional sentimentalism. And Kauppinen correctly takes them to task for this oversight. Yet if I understand him correctly, he conceives of his account of moral judgment in this essay primarily as a causal explanatory thesis. After all, he refers to his account as Neo Classical Explanatory Sentimentalism and claims that it not merely explains the survival but also the origin of moral norms (118). I must admit I am a bit skeptical about this aspect of Kauppinen's position. First of all, I am not sure how one could in principle verify the causal efficacy of such an ideal perspective. Moreover, though maybe I am a bit cynical, looking at human history it seems to me that in ancient Greece, Athens was mostly concerned with Athens. So it is, has been and will be with countries like China, India, Germany and America.

Nevertheless, regardless of the causal efficacy of the empathy from the ideal perspective, reference to such regulated empathy might play a role in the normative justification of our moral judgment or in the explication of the normative status of such judgments. Kauppinen only briefly touches upon this issue. In my opinion, it is exactly for this reason that Adam Smith appealed to the impartial spectator perspective. The question of whether he has been successful in this regard certainly deserves further exploration. If we believe Christine Korsgaard (1996), to address such normative questions requires philosophical reflection on the structure and nature of the first person perspective within which normative questions arise and within which they are negotiated. No philosophical explication of the normative relevance of morality, however, can succeed if is inconsistent with what we know from the scientific third person perspective. It very much speaks in favor of this anthology that it provides us with a comprehensive survey about what we know about the relation between empathy and morality from the scientific third person perspective.

Batson, C.D. 2011.  Altruism in Humans , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bicchieri, C. 2006. The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hoffman, M. 2000.  Empathy and Moral Development , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Korsgaard, C. 1996. The Sources of Normativity . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Prinz, J. 2011a. "Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?" in  Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives , ed. A. Coplan and P. Goldie, 211 -- 229. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Prinz, J. 2011b. "Against Empathy," The Southern Journal of Philosophy , 49 (Spindel Supplement): 214 -- 233.

Slote, M. 2010.  Moral Sentimentalism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Learn How to Write a Perfect Empathy Essay

Are you having a hard time, finding good tips and tricks on writing an empathy essay? Of course, writing it gets easy when you have the proper guidelines. Such as the  professional research paper writers  have for you in this interesting blog post.

Writing an empathy essay is like delving into understanding emotions, seeing things from other’s perspectives, and showing care and understanding. It talks about how empathy shapes relationships, impacts society, and why it’s vital for a kinder world.

No need to fret, as this blog post is like a friendly guide for beginners that will help them understand everything about writing an empathy essay. So, without further ado, let’s get started.

Table of Contents

What is an Empathy Essay?

An empathy essay or emotions essay revolves around the exploration and analysis of empathy as a concept, trait, or practice. It’s about exploring and analyzing what empathy is all about, whether it’s a concept, a trait, or something you have to practice. You know, getting into the nitty-gritty of understanding emotions, different perspectives, and how we can relate to other people’s experiences.

The point of this essay is to show how empathy is super important in relationships, connections between people, and even in society as a whole. It’s all about showing how empathy plays a big role and why it’s so important.

Key elements in empathy writing include a clear definition and explanation of empathy, supported by relatable anecdotes or case studies to illustrate its application. It should delve into empathy’s psychological and societal implications, discussing its effects on individual well-being, relationships, and society at large. Moreover, the empathy essays require a balanced exploration of challenges and complexities related to empathy, such as cultural differences, biases, and the boundaries of empathy in various situations.

Students might find it useful to consider a  professional paper writing service  for an empathy essay due to various reasons. These services often provide access to experienced writers who specialize in crafting well-researched and structured essays. Professional writers can offer a fresh perspective, present nuanced arguments, and ensure the essay meets academic standards.

Why Empathy Essay Writing is Challenging for Some Students?

Writing an essay with empathy can pose challenges for students due to several reasons.

Complex Nature of Empathy

Understanding empathy involves navigating emotional intelligence, perspective-taking, and compassionate understanding, which can be challenging to articulate coherently.

Subjectivity and Personal Experience

Expressing subjective feelings and personal experiences while maintaining objectivity in empathic writing can be difficult for students.

Navigating Sensitivity

Addressing sensitive topics and human complexities while maintaining a respectful and empathetic tone in writing can be demanding.

Handling Diverse Perspectives

Grasping and objectively presenting diverse perspectives across different cultural and social contexts can pose a challenge.

Time Constraints and Academic Pressures

Juggling multiple assignments and deadlines might limit the time and focus students can dedicate to thoroughly researching and crafting an empathy essay.

Expert Tips on Writing a Perfect Empathy Essay

Here are some tips with corresponding examples for writing an empathy essay:

Start with a Compelling Story

Begin your essay with a narrative that illustrates empathy in action. For instance, recount a personal experience where you or someone else demonstrated empathy. For instance:

Example:  As a child, I vividly recall a moment when my grandmother’s empathetic nature became evident. Despite her own struggles, she always took time to comfort others, such as when she helped a neighbor through a difficult loss.

Define Empathy Clearly

Define empathy and its various dimensions using simple language.

Example:  Empathy goes beyond sympathy; it’s about understanding and feeling what someone else is experiencing. It involves recognizing emotions and responding with care and understanding.

Use Real-life Examples

For achieving empathy in writing, incorporate real-life instances or case studies to emphasize empathy’s impact.

Example:  Research shows how empathy in healthcare professionals led to improved patient outcomes. Doctors who showed empathy were found to have patients with higher satisfaction rates and better recovery.

Explore Perspectives

Discuss different perspectives on empathy and its challenges.

Example:  While empathy is crucial, cultural differences can sometimes pose challenges. For instance, what’s considered empathetic in one culture might differ in another, highlighting the need for cultural sensitivity.

Highlight Benefits

Explain the positive outcomes of empathy in various contexts.

Example:  In workplaces, empathy fosters a more cohesive team environment. A study by the researcher found that leaders who display empathy tend to have more engaged and motivated teams.

Acknowledge Challenges

Address the complexities or limitations of empathy.

Example:  Despite its benefits, there are challenges in maintaining boundaries in empathetic relationships. It’s important to balance being empathetic and avoiding emotional burnout.

Conclude with Impact

Wrap up by emphasizing the broader impact of empathy.

Example:  Ultimately, fostering empathy creates a ripple effect, contributing to a more compassionate and understanding society, where individuals feel seen, heard, and supported.

Steps of Writing an Empathy Essay

Here are the steps for writing an empathy essay. You’ll notice that most of the steps are the same as  writing a research paper  or any such academic task.

Understanding the Topic

Familiarize yourself with the concept of empathy and its various dimensions. Define what empathy means to you and what aspects you aim to explore in your essay.

Gather information from credible sources, including academic articles, books, and real-life examples that illustrate empathy’s role and impact. Take notes on key points and examples that you can incorporate into your essays on empathy

Create an outline that includes an introduction (with a thesis statement defining the scope of your essay), body paragraphs discussing different aspects of empathy (such as its definition, importance, challenges, and benefits), and a conclusion summarizing the main points.

Introduction

Start your essay with a compelling hook or anecdote related to empathy. Introduce the topic and provide a clear thesis statement outlining what you’ll discuss in the essay.

Body Paragraphs

Each paragraph should focus on a specific aspect of empathy supported by evidence or examples. Discuss empathy’s definition, its significance in different contexts (personal, societal, professional), challenges in practicing empathy, benefits, and potential limitations.

Use Examples

Incorporate real-life examples or case studies to illustrate your points and make them relatable to the reader.

Address Counterarguments

Acknowledge differing perspectives or potential counterarguments related to empathy and address them thoughtfully within your essay.

Summarize the main points discussed in the essay. Restate the significance of empathy and its impact, leaving the reader with a lasting impression or call to action.

Edit and Revise

Review your essay for coherence, clarity, and consistency. Check for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors. Ensure that your ideas flow logically and that your essay effectively communicates your thoughts on empathy.

Make any necessary revisions based on feedback or additional insights. Ensure that your essay meets the guidelines and requirements if it’s for a specific assignment. Then, finalize and submit your empathy essay.

Final Thoughts

In this blog post, we’ve tried to make writing an empathy essay easier for students. We’ve explained it step by step, using easy examples and clear explanations. The goal is to help students understand what empathy is and how to write about it in an essay.

The steps we’ve shared for writing an empathy essay are straightforward. They start with understanding the topic and doing research, then move on to outlining, writing, and polishing the essay. We’ve highlighted the importance of using personal stories, real-life examples, and organizing ideas well.

Students can benefit from our  assignment writing service  for their empathy essays. Our experienced writers can provide expert help, ensuring the essays meet academic standards and are well-written. This support saves time and helps students focus on other schoolwork while getting a top-notch empathy essay.

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What’s the lowest, and highest, form of knowledge?

Since the dawn of time, people have had an insatiable desire to learn new things. In other words, they sought to acquire knowledge – they wanted to know what was behind that bush in front of them, what was over the next hill, what would happen if they did or didn’t do this or that …

For thousands of years, much of that desire for learning lay in our need to survive, by avoiding danger and dangerous situations. And much of that insatiable thirst for new knowledge has also enabled us to evolve as a species to the level we have in terms of health, shelter, safety and security, providing for ourselves, connecting with one another, and so forth.

There is no doubt that knowledge has been the means to the comfortable and successful lives generally enjoyed by many people today.

But just as things were starting to look good, up popped another form of knowledge – the wrong kind of “knowledge” – which is now starting to cause dissention, confusion and conflict because of how it is being abused. In some extreme cases, it’s even resulting in unnecessary deaths.

The knowledge I am referring to is what the late Oakland County Republican, Bill Bullard, considered the lowest form of knowledge.

“Opinion,” Bullard said, “is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding.”

And Bullard was quite correct. Opinion is not based on fact or evidence. It’s based on whatever a person chooses to assume or believe to be true – something that is often justified by the woke as being “my truth”. Now nobody can argue with you when you’re expressing what you consider to be “your truth”, no matter how detached from reality your truth actually is. And that’s where the problems pop up. That opens the way for an “anything goes” approach to reality.

You see, when someone sets out to deceive others, the first person they deceive is themselves. And then all bets are off because, after that, they’re fair game for any assumption they choose to claim is true or “their truth”. Others, in turn, then have no way to respond to the claims of those living “their truth”.

This explains why there are so many people who are alleged to have engaged in various criminal or corrupt activities who loudly protest their innocence and “deny the charges with the contempt they deserve”. That’s why it’s so important that each of those allegations be tested in a competent court of law.

We therefore have to ensure that all new knowledge we learn is based on sound evidence and not on what we choose to believe to be true simply because that particular “truth” fits our world view.

This brings us to the next challenge concerning knowledge – “knowledge” based on beliefs. Beliefs are defined as” an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially without proof.” Notice the last part – “especially without proof”. Yes, no proof is required for anybody’s beliefs. And beliefs are not confined to religious beliefs only, which are based on faith. They include our beliefs about ourselves and our world, about other people, about what we believe to be possible or impossible, and so on.

Now, the highest form of knowledge, according to Bullard, is empathy. The reason for this, he says, is that “it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the ‘self’ kind of understanding.”

Do you see where this is going? Empathy is the kind of knowledge leaders should aspire to. In the past, many leaders were driven by their egos and lived in their own world. Their purpose was all about themselves.

Those days are fading fast. If you want to be a leader that has any impact on people today, you’re going to have to learn how to identify the lowest form of knowledge and avoid it like the plague. You’re also going to have to learn how to deal with people who operate on the basis of the lowest form of knowledge. Your challenge will be in learning how to aspire to the highest form of knowledge – putting yourself in the shoes of others and seeing the world from their point of view. When you can do that, like an expert hostage negotiator, you will be able to get people to do what you want them to do with them thinking it was their idea.

That’s what intelligent leadership of the future is all about!

If you want to learn more about how you can introduce this powerful, new form of leadership into your company next year, you’re welcome to email me to take the conversation forward.

Alan Hosking is the Publisher of HR Future magazine, www.hrfuture.net and @HRFuturemag . He is an internationally recognised authority on leadership competencies for the future and teaches experienced business leaders as well as millennial managers how to lead with empathy, compassion, integrity, purpose and agility. In 2018, he was named by US-based web site Disruptordaily.com as one of the “ Top 25 Future of Work Influencers to Follow on Twitter “. In 2020, he was n amed one of the “ Top 200 Global Power Thought Leaders to watch in 2021” by peopleHum in India.

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Plato on Knowledge in the Theaetetus

This article introduces Plato’s dialogue the Theaetetus (section 1), and briefly summarises its plot (section 2). Two leading interpretations of the dialogue, the Unitarian and Revisionist readings, are contrasted in section 3. Sections 4 to 8 explain and discuss the main arguments of the chief divisions of the dialogue. Section 9 provides some afterthoughts about the dialogue as a whole.

1. Introduction

2. summary of the dialogue, 3. overall interpretations of the theaetetus, 4. the introduction to the dialogue: 142a–145e, 5. definition by examples: 146a–151d, 6.1 the definition of knowledge as perception: 151d–e, 6.2 the “cold wind” argument; and the theory of flux: 152a–160e, 6.3 the refutation of the thesis that knowledge is perception: 160e5–186e12, 6.4 the digression: 172c1–177b7, 6.5 last objection to protagoras: 177c6–179b5, 6.6 last objection to heracleitus: 179c1–183c2, 6.7 the final refutation of d1 : 183c4–187a8, 7.1 the puzzle of misidentification: 187e5–188c8, 7.2 second puzzle about false belief: “believing what is not”: 188c10–189b9, 7.3 third puzzle about false belief: allodoxia : 189b10–190e4, 7.4 fourth puzzle about false belief: the wax tablet: 190e5–196c5, 7.5 fifth puzzle about false belief: the aviary: 196d1–200d4, 7.6 the final refutation of d2 : 200d5–201c7, 8.1 the dream of socrates: 201d8–202d7, 8.2 critique of the dream theory: 202d8–206c2, 8.3 three attempts to understand logos : 206c2–210a9, 9. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

The Theaetetus, which probably dates from about 369 BC, is arguably Plato’s greatest work on epistemology. (Arguably, it is his greatest work on anything.) Plato (c.427–347 BC) has much to say about the nature of knowledge elsewhere. But only the Theaetetus offers a set-piece discussion of the question “What is knowledge?”

Like many other Platonic dialogues, the Theaetetus is dominated by question-and-answer exchanges, with Socrates as main questioner. His two respondents are Theaetetus, a brilliant young mathematician, and Theaetetus’ tutor Theodorus, who is rather less young (and rather less brilliant).

Also like other Platonic dialogues, the main discussion of the Theaetetus is set within a framing conversation (142a–143c) between Eucleides and Terpsion (cp. Phaedo 59c). This frame may be meant as a dedication of the work to the memory of the man Theaetetus. Sedley 2004 (6–8) has argued that it is meant to set some distance between Plato’s authorial voice and the various other voices (including Socrates’) that are heard in the dialogue. Alternatively, or also, it may be intended, like Symposium 172–3, to prompt questions about the reliability of knowledge based on testimony. (Cp. the law-court passage ( Theaetetus 201a–c), and Socrates’ dream ( Theaetetus 201c–202c).)

The Theaetetus ’ most important similarity to other Platonic dialogues is that it is aporetic —it is a dialogue that ends in an impasse . The Theaetetus reviews three definitions of knowledge in turn; plus, in a preliminary discussion, one would-be definition which, it is said, does not really count. Each of these proposals is rejected, and no alternative is explicitly offered. Thus we complete the dialogue without discovering what knowledge is. We discover only three things that knowledge is not ( Theaetetus 210c; cp. 183a5, 187a1).

This matters, given the place that the Theaetetus is normally assigned in the chronology of Plato’s writings. Most scholars agree that Plato’s first writings were the “Socratic” dialogues (as they are often called), which ask questions of the “What is…?” form and typically fail to find answers: “What is courage?” ( Laches ), “What is self-control?” ( Charmides ), “What is justice?” ( Alcibiades I ; Republic 1), “What is holiness?” ( Euthyphro ), “What is friendship?” ( Lysis ), “What is virtue?” ( Meno ), “What is nobility?” ( Hippias Major ). After some transitional works ( Protagoras, Gorgias, Cratylus, Euthydemus ) comes a series of dialogues in which Plato writes to a less tightly-defined format, not always focusing on a “What is…?” question, nor using the question-and-answer interrogative method that he himself depicts as strictly Socratic: the Phaedo , the Phaedrus , the Symposium, and the Republic . In these dialogues Plato shows a much greater willingness to put positive and ambitious metaphysical views in Socrates’ mouth, and to make Socrates the spokesman for what we call “Plato’s theory of Forms.”

After these, it is normally supposed that Plato’s next two works were the Parmenides and the Theaetetus , probably in that order. If so, and if we take as seriously as Plato seems to the important criticisms of the theory of Forms that are made in the Parmenides , then the significance of the Theaetetus ’s return to the aporetic method looks obvious. Apparently Plato has abandoned the certainties of his middle-period works, such as the theory of Forms, and returned to the almost-sceptical manner of the early dialogues. In the Theaetetus , the Forms that so dominated the Republic ’s discussions of epistemology are hardly mentioned at all. A good understanding of the dialogue must make sense of this fact.

At the gates of the city of Megara in 369 BC, Eucleides and Terpsion hear a slave read out Eucleides’ memoir of a philosophical discussion that took place in 399 BC, shortly before Socrates’ trial and execution (142a–143c). In this, the young Theaetetus is introduced to Socrates by his mathematics tutor, Theodorus. Socrates questions Theaetetus about the nature of expertise, and this leads him to pose the key question of the dialogue: “What is knowledge?” (143d–145e). Theaetetus’ first response ( D0 ) is to give examples of knowledge such as geometry, astronomy, harmony, arithmetic (146a–c). Socrates objects that, for any x , examples of x are neither necessary nor sufficient for a definition of x (146d–147e). Theaetetus admits this, and contrasts the ease with which he and his classmates define mathematical terms with his inability to define knowledge (147c–148e). Socrates offers to explain Theaetetus’ bewilderment about the question “What is knowledge?” by comparing himself with a midwife: Theaetetus, he suggests, is in discomfort because he is in intellectual labour (148e–151d).

Thus prompted, Theaetetus states his first acceptable definition, which is the proposal that

Socrates does not respond to this directly. Instead he claims that D1 entails two other theories (Protagoras’ and Heracleitus’), which he expounds (151e–160e) and then criticises (160e–183c). Socrates eventually presents no fewer than eleven arguments, not all of which seem seriously intended, against the Protagorean and Heracleitean views. If any of these arguments hit its target, then by modus tollens D1 is also false. A more direct argument against D1 is eventually given at 184–7.

In 187b4–8, Theaetetus proposes a second definition of knowledge:

D2 provokes Socrates to ask: how can there be any such thing as false belief? There follows a five-phase discussion which attempts to come up with an account of false belief. All five of these attempts fail, and that appears to be the end of the topic of false belief. Finally, at 200d–201c, Socrates returns to D2 itself. He dismisses D2 just by arguing that accidental true beliefs cannot be called knowledge , giving Athenian jurymen as an example of accidental true belief.

Theaetetus tries a third time. His final proposal is:

The ensuing discussion attempts to spell out what it might be like for D3 to be true, then makes three attempts to spell out what a logos is.

In 201d–202d, the famous passage known as The Dream of Socrates , a two-part ontology of elements and complexes is proposed. Parallel to this ontology runs a theory of explanation that claims that to explain, to offer a logos, is to analyse complexes into their elements, i.e., those parts which cannot be further analysed. Crucially, the Dream Theory says that knowledge of O is true belief about O plus an account of O ’s composition. If O is not composite, O cannot be known, but only “perceived” (202b6). When Socrates argues against the Dream Theory (202d8–206b11), it is this entailment that he focuses on.

Socrates then turns to consider, and reject, three attempts to spell out what a logos is—to give an account of “account.” The first attempt takes logos just to mean “speech” or “statement” (206c–e). The second account (206e4–208b12) of “ logos of O ” takes it as “enumeration of the elements of O .” The third and last proposal (208c1–210a9) is that to give the logos of O is to cite the sêmeion or diaphora of O , the “sign” or diagnostic feature wherein O differs from everything else.

All three attempts to give an account of “account” fail. The day’s discussion, and the dialogue, end in aporia. Socrates leaves to face his enemies in the courtroom.

The Theaetetus is a principal field of battle for one of the main disputes between Plato’s interpreters. This is the dispute between Unitarians and Revisionists .

Unitarians argue that Plato’s works display a unity of doctrine and a continuity of purpose throughout. Unitarians include Aristotle, Proclus, and all the ancient and mediaeval commentators; Bishop Berkeley; and in the modern era, Schleiermacher, Ast, Shorey, Diès, Ross, Cornford, and Cherniss.

Revisionists retort that Plato’s works are full of revisions, retractations, and changes of direction. Eminent Revisionists include Lutoslawski, Ryle, Robinson, Runciman, Owen, McDowell, Bostock, and many recent commentators.

Unitarianism is historically the dominant interpretive tradition. Revisionism, it appears, was not invented until the text-critical methods, such as stylometry, that were developed in early nineteenth-century German biblical studies were transferred to Plato.

In the twentieth century, a different brand of Revisionism has dominated English-speaking Platonic studies. This owes its impetus to a desire to read Plato as charitably as possible, and a belief that a charitable reading of Plato’s works will minimise their dependence on the theory of Forms. (Corollary: Unitarians are likelier than Revisionists to be sympathetic to the theory of Forms.)

Unitarianism could be the thesis that all of Plato’s work is, really, Socratic in method and inspiration, and that Plato should be credited with no view that is not endorsed in the early dialogues. (In some recent writers, Unitarianism is this thesis: see Penner and Rowe (2005).) But this is not the most usual form of Unitarianism, which is more likely to “read back” the concerns of the Phaedo and the Republic into the Socratic dialogues, than to “read forward” the studied agnosticism of the early works into these more ambitious later dialogues. Likewise, Revisionism could be evidenced by the obvious changes of outlook that occur, e.g., between the Charmides and the Phaedo , or again between the Protagoras and the Gorgias . But the main focus of the Revisionist/Unitarian debate has never been on these dialogues. The contrasts between the Charmides and the Phaedo , and the Protagoras and the Gorgias, tell us little about the question whether Plato ever abandoned the theory of Forms. And that has usually been the key dispute between Revisionists and Unitarians.

Hence the debate has typically focused on the contrast between the “the Middle Period dialogues” and “the Late dialogues.” Revisionists say that the Middle Period dialogues enounce positive doctrines, above all the theory of Forms, which the Late dialogues criticise, reject, or simply bypass. The main place where Revisionists (e.g., Ryle 1939) suppose that Plato criticises the theory of Forms is in the Parmenides (though some Revisionists find criticism of the theory of Forms in the Theaetetus and Sophist as well). The main places where Revisionists look to see Plato managing without the theory of Forms are the Theaetetus and Sophist .

Ryle’s Revisionism was soon supported by other Oxford Plato scholars such as Robinson 1950 and Runciman 1962 (28). Revisionism was also defended by G.E.L. Owen. More recently, McDowell 1976, Bostock 1988, and Burnyeat 1990 are three classic books on the Theaetetus of a decidedly Revisionist tendency. (McDowell shows a particularly marked reluctance to bring in the theory of Forms anywhere where he is not absolutely compelled to.)

Revisionists are committed by their overall stance to a number of more particular views . They are more or less bound to say that the late Plato takes the Parmenides’ critique of the theory of Forms to be cogent, or at least impressive; that the Sophist’ s theory of “the five greatest kinds” ( Sophist 254b–258e) is not a development of the theory of Forms; and that the Timaeus was written before the Parmenides, because of the Timaeus’ apparent defence of theses from the theory of Forms. Their line on the Theaetetus will be that its argument does not support the theory of Forms; that the Theaetetus is interesting precisely because it shows us how good at epistemology Plato is once he frees himself from his obsession with the Forms.

Some of these Revisionist claims look easier for Unitarians to dispute than others. For example, Plato does not think that the arguments of Parmenides 130b–135c actually disprove the theory of Forms. Rather, it is obviously Plato’s view that Parmenides’ arguments against the Forms can be refuted. See Parmenides 135a–d, where Plato explicitly says—using Parmenides as his mouthpiece—that these arguments will be refuted by anyone of adequate philosophical training. (Whether anyone “of adequate philosophical training” is available is, of course, another question.)

Another problem for the Revisionist concerns Owen 1965’s proposal, adopted by Bostock 1988, to redate the Timaeus to the Middle Period, thus escaping the conclusion that Plato still accepted the theory of Forms at the end of his philosophical career. The trouble with this is that it is not only the Timaeus that the Revisionist needs to redate. In quite a number of apparently Late dialogues, Plato seems sympathetic to the theory of Forms: see e.g., Philebus 61e and Laws 965c.

On the other hand, the Revisionist claim that the Theaetetus shows Plato doing more or less completely without the theory of Forms is very plausible. There are no explicit mentions of the Forms at all in the Theaetetus , except possibly (and even this much is disputed) in what many take to be the philosophical backwater of the Digression. The main argument of the dialogue seems to get along without even implicit appeal to the theory of Forms. In the Theaetetus , Revisionism seems to be on its strongest ground of all.

The usual Unitarian answer is that this silence is studied. In the Theaetetus, Unitarians suggest, Plato is showing what knowledge is not . His argument is designed to show that certain sorts of alternatives to Plato’s own account of knowledge must fail. Plato demonstrates this failure by the ‘maieutic’ method of developing those accounts until they fail. Thus the Theaetetus shows the impossibility of a successful account of knowledge that does not invoke the Forms.

The fault-line between Unitarians and Revisionists is the deepest fissure separating interpreters of the Theaetetus . It is not the only distinction among overall interpretations of the dialogue. It has also been suggested, both in the ancient and the modern eras, that the Theaetetus is a sceptical work; that the Theaetetus is a genuinely aporetic work; and that the Theaetetus is a disjointed work. However, there is no space to review these possibilities here. It is time to look more closely at the detail of the arguments that Plato gives in the distinct sections of the dialogue.

We should not miss the three philosophical theses that are explicitly advanced in the Introduction. They are offered without argument by Socrates, and agreed to without argument by Theaetetus, at 145d7–145e5:

• The wise are wise sophiai (= by/ because of/ in respect of/ as a result of wisdom:145d11).
• To learn is to become wiser about the topic you are learning about (145d8–9).
• Wisdom ( sophia ) and knowledge ( epistêmê ) are the same thing (145e5).

All three theses might seem contentious today. (1) seems to allude to Phaedo 100e’s notorious thesis about the role of the Form of F -ness in any x ’s being F —that x is F “ by the Form of F -ness.” (2) looks contentious because it implies (3); and (3) brings me to a second question about 142a–145e (which is also an important question about the whole dialogue): What is the meaning of the Greek word that I am translating as “knowledge,” epistêmê ?

Much has been written about Plato’s words for knowledge. One important question raised by Runciman 1962 is the question whether Plato was aware of the commonplace modern distinction between knowing that, knowing how, and knowing what (or whom). Nothing is more natural for modern philosophers than to contrast knowledge of objects (knowledge by acquaintance or objectual knowledge; French connaître ) with knowledge of how to do things (technique knowledge), and with knowledge of propositions or facts (propositional knowledge; French savoir ). Runciman doubts that Plato is aware of this threefold distinction (1962, 17): “At the time of writing the Theaetetus Plato had made no clear distinction [between] knowing that, knowing how, and knowing by acquaintance.”

Against this, Plato’s word for knowing how is surely tekhnê , from which we get the English word “technique.” Plato obviously thinks tekhnê incidental to a serious discussion of epistêmê . This is part of the point of the argument against definition by examples that begins at 146d (cp. 177c–179b).

As for the difference between knowing that and knowledge by acquaintance: the Theaetetus does mix passages that discuss the one sort of knowledge with passages that discuss the other. This does not imply that Plato was unaware of the difference. Perhaps he wants to discuss theories of knowledge that find deep conceptual connections between the two sorts of knowledge.

A grammatical point is relevant here. The objectual “I know Socrates” in classical Greek is oida (or gignôskô ) ton Sôkratên ; the propositional “I know Socrates is wise” is oida (or gignôskô ) ton Sôkratên sophon onta , literally “I know Socrates being wise” or, colloquially, just oida ton Sôkratên sophon , literally “I know Socrates wise”. Thus the Greek idiom can readily treat the object of propositional knowledge, which in English would most naturally be a that-clause, as a thing considered as having a quality . We might almost say that Greek treats what is known in propositional knowledge as just one special case of what is known in objectual knowledge. This suggests that the ancient Greeks naturally saw propositional and objectual knowledge as more closely related than we do (though not necessarily as indistinguishable). If so, Plato may have felt able to offer a single treatment for the two kinds of knowledge without thereby confusing them. The point will be relevant to the whole of the Theaetetus .

At 145d Socrates states the “one little question that puzzles” him: “What is knowledge?” Theaetetus’ first response ( D0 ) is to offer examples of knowledge (146c). Socrates rejects this response, arguing that, for any x , examples of x are neither necessary nor sufficient for a definition of x . They are not necessary, because they are irrelevant (146e). They are not sufficient, because they presuppose the understanding that a definition is meant to provide (147a–b). Moreover (147c), a definition could be briefly stated, whereas talking about examples is “an interminable diversion” ( aperanton hodon ).

Does Socrates produce good arguments against definition by examples? Many philosophers think not (McDowell 1976 (115), Geach 1966, Santas 1972, Burnyeat 1977). They often argue this by appealing to the authority of Wittgenstein, who famously complains ( The Blue and Brown Books , 20) that “When Socrates asks the question, ‘What is knowledge?’, he does not regard it even as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge.” For arguments against this modern consensus, see Chappell 2005 (36–37).

Some commentators have taken Socrates’ critique of definition by examples to be an implicit critique of the Republic ’s procedure of distinguishing knowledge, belief, and ignorance by distinguishing their objects. The suggestion was first made by Ryle 1990 (23), who points out that “Socrates makes it clear that what he wants discussed is not a list of things that people know,” “but an elucidation of the concept of knowledge.” Ryle suggests that “Attention to this simple point might have saved Cornford from saying that the implicit conclusion of the dialogue is that ‘true knowledge has for its objects things of a different order’.” Ryle thinks it “silly” to suggest that knowledge can be defined merely by specifying its objects.

However, 145e–147c cannot be read as a critique of the Republic ’s procedure of distinguishing knowledge from belief by their objects. 145e–147c is not against defining knowledge by examples of objects of knowledge; it is against defining knowledge by examples of kinds of knowledge. (See e.g., 146e7, “We weren’t wanting to make a list of kinds of knowledge.”) This is a different matter.

Why, anyway, would the Platonist of the Republic think that examples of the objects of knowledge are enough for a definition of knowledge? He is surely the last person to think that. The person who will think this is the empiricist, who thinks that we acquire all our concepts by exposure to examples of their application: Locke, Essay II.1, Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 100a4–9. For the Platonist, definition by examples is never even possible; for the empiricist, definition by examples is the natural method in every case. This suggests that empiricism is a principal target of the argument of the Theaetetus . More about this in sections 6–8.

Theaetetus is puzzled by his own inability to answer Socrates’ request for a definition of knowledge, and contrasts it with the ease with which he can provide mathematical definitions. He gives an example of a mathematical definition; scholars are divided about the aptness of the parallel between this, and what would be needed for a definition of knowledge. Socrates’ response, when Theaetetus still protests his inability to define knowledge, is to compare himself to a midwife in a long and intricate analogy.

Many ancient Platonists read the midwife analogy, and more recently Cornford 1935 has read it, as alluding to the theory of recollection. But it is better not to import metaphysical assumptions into the text without good reason, and it is hard to see what the reason would be beyond a determination to insist that Plato always maintained the theory of recollection. With or without this speculation, the midwife passage does tell us something important about how the Theaetetus is going to proceed. In line with the classification that the ancient editors set at the front of the dialogue, it is going to be peirastikos , an experimental dialogue. It will try out a number of suggestions about the nature of knowledge. As in the aporetic dialogues, there is no guarantee that any of these suggestions will be successful (and every chance that none of them will be).

So read, the midwife passage can also tell us something important about the limitations of the Theaetetus’ inquiry. The limitations of the inquiry are the limitations of the main inquirers, and neither (the historical) Socrates nor Theaetetus was a card-carrying adherent of Plato’s theory of Forms. Perhaps the dialogue brings us only as far as the threshold of the theory of Forms precisely because, on Socratic principles, one can get no further. To get beyond where the Theaetetus leaves off, you have to be a Platonist. (For book-length developments of this reading of the Theaetetus, see Sedley 2004 and Chappell 2005.)

6. First Definition ( D1 ): “Knowledge is Perception”: 151e–187a

Between Stephanus pages 151 and 187, and leaving aside the Digression, 172–177 (section 6d), 31 pages of close and complex argument state, discuss, and eventually refute the first of Theaetetus’ three serious attempts at a definition of knowledge:

As before, there are two main alternative readings of 151–187: the Unitarian and the Revisionist. On the Unitarian reading, Plato’s purpose is to salvage as much as possible of the theories of Protagoras and Heracleitus (each respectfully described as ou phaulon : 151e8, 152d2). Plato’s strategy is to show that these theories have their own distinctive area of application, the perceptible or sensible world, within which they are true. However, the sensible world is not the whole world, and so these theories are not the whole truth. We get absurdities if we try to take them as unrestrictedly true. To avoid these absurdities it is necessary to posit the intelligible world (the world of the Forms) alongside the sensible world (the world of perception). When this is done, Platonism subsumes the theories of Protagoras and Heracleitus as partial truths. On this reading, the strategy of the discussion of D1 is to transcend Protagoras and Heracleitus: to explain their views by showing how they are, not the truth, but parts of a larger truth. In the process the discussion reveals logical pressures that may push us towards the two-worlds Platonism that many readers, e.g., Ross and Cornford, find in the Republic and Timaeus.

On the Revisionist reading, Plato’s purpose is to refute the theories of Protagoras and Heracleitus. He thinks that the absurdities those theories give rise to, come not from trying to take the theories as unrestrictedly true, but from trying to take them as true at all , even of the sensible world. Anyone who tries to take seriously the thesis that knowledge is perception has to adopt theories of knowledge and perception like Protagoras’ and Heracleitus’. But their theories are untenable. By modus tollens this shows that D1 itself is untenable. On this reading, the strategy of the discussion of D1 is to move us towards the view that sensible phenomena have to fall under the same general metaphysical theory as intelligible phenomena.

This outline of the two main alternatives for 151–187 shows how strategic and tactical issues of Plato interpretation interlock. For instance, the outline shows how important it is for an overall understanding of the Theaetetus to have a view on the following questions of detail (more about them later):

• At 156a–157c, is Socrates just reporting, or also endorsing, a Heracleitean flux theory of perception?
• What is the date of the Timaeus , which seems (28–29, 45b–46c, 49e) to present a very similar theory of perception to that found in Theaetetus 156–7?
• What does Plato take to be the logical relations between the three positions under discussion in 151–184 ( D1 , Protagoras’ theory, and Heracleitus’ theory)? The closer he takes them to be, the more support that seems to give to the Revisionist view that the whole of 151–187 is one gigantic modus tollens . The more separate they are, the better for those versions of Unitarianism that suggest that Plato wants to pick and choose among the positions offered in 151–187.

So much for the overall structure of 151–187; now for the parts.

At 151d7–e3 Theaetetus proposes:

Socrates immediately equates D1 with Protagoras’s thesis that

and takes this, in turn, to entail the thesis:

Socrates then adds that, in its turn, PS entails Heracleitus’ view that “All is flux,” that there are no stably existing objects with stably enduring qualities .

The first of these deft exchanges struck the Anonymous Commentator as disingenuous: “Plato himself knew that Protagoras’ opinion about knowledge was not the same as Theaetetus’” (Anon, ad loc. ). Certainly it is easy to see counter-examples to the alleged entailment. Take, for instance, the thesis that knowledge is awareness (which is often the right way to translate aisthêsis ). Or take the thesis that to know is to perceive things as God, or the Ideal Observer, perceives them, and that we fail to know (or to perceive) just insofar as our opinions are other than God’s or the Ideal Observer’s. These theses are both versions of D1 . Neither version entails the claim that “man is the measure of all things” ( Hm )—nor the Protagorean view that lies behind that slogan.

So how, if at all, does D1 entail all the things that Socrates apparently makes it entail in 151–184? And does Plato think it has all these entailments? Evidently the answer to that depends on how we understand D1 . In particular, it depends on the meaning of the word aisthêsis , “perception,” in D1 . If the slogan “Knowledge is perception” equates knowledge with what ordinary speakers of classical Greek would have meant by aisthêsis , then D1 does not entail Protagoras’ and Heracleitus’ views. In the ordinary sense of aisthêsis , there are (as just pointed out) too many other possible ways of spelling out D1 for the move from D1 to Hm to be logically obligatory. But if the slogan “Knowledge is perception” equates knowledge with what Protagoras and Heracleitus meant by aisthêsis , D1 does entail Protagoras’ and Heracleitus’ views. Of course it does; for then D1 simply says that knowledge is just what Protagoras and Heracleitus say knowledge is.

At 152b1–152c8 Socrates begins his presentation of Protagoras’ view that things are to any human just as they appear to that human by taking the example of a wind which affects two people differently. Such cases, he says, support Protagoras’ analysis: “that the wind is cold to the one who feels cold , but not cold to the one who does not feel cold. ”

Some scholars (Cornford 1935, 33–4; Waterlow 1977) think that the point of the argument is that both “the wind in itself is cold” and “the wind in itself is not cold (but warm)” are true: “‘Warm’ and ‘cold’ are two properties which can co-exist in the same physical object. I perceive the one, you perceive the other.” The trouble with this suggestion is that much of the detail of the Protagorean/Heracleitean position in 151–184 seems to be generated by Protagoras’ desire to avoid contradiction. If Cornford thinks that Protagoras is not concerned to avoid contradicting himself, then he has a huge task of reinterpretation ahead of him.

Rather, perhaps, the point of the argument is this: Neither “The wind in itself is cold” nor “The wind in itself is warm” is true. If we had grounds for affirming either, we would have equally good grounds for affirming both; but the conjunction “The wind in itself is cold and the wind in itself is warm” is a contradiction. This contradiction, says Protagoras, obliges us to give up all talk about “the wind in itself,” and switch to relativised talk about the wind as it seems to me or to you, etc. (The same contradiction pushes the Plato of the Republic in the opposite direction: it leads him to place no further trust in any relativised talk, precisely because such talk cannot get us beyond such contradictions.)

So we have moved from D1 , to Hm , to PS . At 152c8–152e1 Socrates adds that, in its turn, PS entails Heracleitus’ view that “All is flux,” that there are no stably existing objects with stably enduring qualities. The reason given for this is the same thought as the one at the centre of the cold-wind argument: that everything to which any predicate can be applied, according to one perception, can also have the negation of that predicate applied to it, according to an opposite perception with equally good credentials.

After a passage (152e1–153d5) in which Socrates presents what seem to be deliberately bad arguments, eight of them, for Heracleitus’ flux thesis, Socrates notes three shocking theses which the flux theory implies:

• Qualities have no independent existence in time and space (153d6–e1).
• Qualities do not exist except in perceptions of them (153e3–154a8).
• (The dice paradox:) changes in a thing’s qualities are not so much changes in that thing as in perceptions of that thing (154a9–155c6).

These shocking implications, Socrates says, give the phenomenal subjectivist his reason to reject the entire object/quality metaphysics, and to replace it with a metaphysics of flux.

In 155c–157c the flux theory is used to develop a Protagorean/Heracleitean account of perception, to replace accounts based on the object/property ontology of common sense. Socrates notes the subversive implications of the theory of flux for the meaningfulness and truth-aptness of most of our language as it stands. (He returns to this point at 183a–b.) The ontology of the flux theory distinguishes kinds of “process” ( kinêsis ), i.e., of flux, in two ways: as fast or slow, and as active or passive. Hence there are four such processes. On these the flux theory’s account of perception rests.

A rather similar theory of perception is given by Plato in Timaeus 45b–46c, 67c–68d. This fact has much exercised scholars, since it relates closely to the question whether Plato himself accepts the flux theory of perception (cp. Theaetetus 157c5). The question is important because it connects with the question of whether the Revisionist or Unitarian reading of 151–187 is right. (For more on this issue, see Cornford 1935 (49–50); Crombie 1963, II (21–22); Burnyeat 1990 (17–18); McDowell 1973 (139–140), Chappell 2005 (74–78).)

At 157c–160c Socrates states a first objection to the flux theory. This asks how the flux theorist is to distinguish false (deceptive) appearances such as dreams from the true (undeceptive) appearances of the waking world. The flux theorist’s answer is that such appearances should not be described as ‘true’ and ‘false’ appearances to the same person. Rather they should be described as different appearances to different people. According to the flux theorist, we have the same person if and only if we have the same combination of a perception and a perceiving (159c–d). So there is no need to call any appearances false . Thus we preserve the claim that all appearances are true—a claim which must be true if knowledge is perception in the sense that Socrates has taken that definition.

160b–d summarises the whole of 151–160. Socrates shows how the exploration of Theaetetus’ identification of knowledge with perception has led us to develop a whole battery of views: in particular, a Protagorean doctrine of the incorrigibility of perception, and a Heracleitean account of what perception is. Thus “perception has one of the two marks of knowledge, infallibility” (Cornford 1935, 58); “and, if we can accept Protagoras’ identification of what appears to me with what is, ignoring the addition ‘for me’ and the distinction between being and becoming, the case will be complete.”

160e marks the transition from the statement and exposition of the definition of knowledge as perception ( D1 ), to the presentation of criticism and refutation of that definition.

Scholars have divided about the overall purpose of 160e–186e. Mostly they have divided along the lines described in section 3, taking either a Revisionist or a Unitarian view of Part One of the Theaetetus .

Revisionists say that the target of the critique of 160e–186e is everything that has been said in support and development of D1 ever since 151. Unitarians argue that Plato’s criticism of D1 in 160e–186e is more selective. Obviously his aim is to refute D1 , the equation of knowledge with perception. But that does not oblige him to reject the account of perception that has been offered in support of D1 . And Plato does not reject this account: he accepts it.

Thus the Unitarian Cornford argues that Plato is not rejecting the Heracleitean flux theory of perception. He is rejecting only D1 ’s claim that knowledge is that sort of perception. It remains possible that perception is just as Heracleitus describes it. Likewise, Cornford suggests, the Protagorean doctrine that “man is the measure of all things” is true provided it is taken to mean only “all things that we perceive .”

If some form of Unitarianism is correct, an examination of 160–186 should show that Plato’s strategy in the critique of D1 highlights two distinctions:

• A distinction between the claim that the objects of perception are in flux, and the claim that everything is in flux.
• A distinction between bare sensory awareness, and judgement on the basis of such awareness.

One vital passage for distinction (1) is 181b–183b. If Unitarianism is right, this passage should be an attack on the Heracleitean thesis that everything is in flux, but not an attack on the Heracleitean thesis that the objects of perception are in flux. According to Unitarians, the thesis that the objects of perception are in flux is a Platonic thesis too. Readers should ask themselves whether this is the right way to read 181b –183b.

Distinction (2) seems to be explicitly stated at 179c. There also seems to be clear evidence of distinction (2) in the final argument against D1 , at 184–187. Distinction (2) is also at work, apparently, in the discussion of some of the nine objections addressed to the Protagorean theory. Some of these objections can plausibly be read as points about the unattractive consequences of failing to distinguish the Protagorean claim that bare sense-awareness is incorrigible (as the Unitarian Plato agrees) from the further Protagorean claim that judgements about sense-awareness are incorrigible (which the Unitarian Plato denies).

The criticism of D1 breaks down into twelve separate arguments, interrupted by the Digression (172c–177c: translated and discussed separately in section 6.4 below). There is no space here to comment in detail on every one of these arguments, some of which, as noted above, have often been thought frivolous or comically intended (cp. 152e1–153d5). Some brief notes on the earlier objections will show what the serious point of each might be.

The first objection to Protagoras (160e–161d) observes that if all perceptions are true, then there is no reason to think that animal perceptions are inferior to human ones: a situation which Socrates finds absurd.

If this objection is really concerned with perceptions strictly so called, then it obviously fails. Protagoras just accepts this supposedly absurd consequence; and apparently he is right to do so. If we consider animals and humans just as perceivers, there is no automatic reason to prefer human perceptions. Many animal perceptions are superior to human perceptions (dogs’ hearing, hawks’ eyesight, dolphins’ echolocatory ability, most mammals’ sense of smell, etc.), and the Greeks knew it, cf. Homer’s commonplace remarks about “far-sighted eagles”, or indeed Aristotle, in the Eudemian Ethics , 1231a5–6. The objection works much better rephrased as an objection about judgements about perceptions, rather than about perceptions strictly so called. Humans are no more and no less perceivers than pigs, baboons, or tadpoles. But they are different in their powers of judgement about perceptions.

This distinction between arguments against a Protagorean view about perception and a Protagorean view about judgement about perception is relevant to the second objection too (161d–162a). This objection (cp. Cratylus 386c) makes the point that Protagoras’ theory implies that no one is wiser than anyone else. Notably, the argument does not attack the idea that perception is infallible. Rather, it attacks the idea that the opinion or judgement that anyone forms on the basis of perception is infallible (161d3). (This is an important piece of support for Unitarianism: cp. distinction (2) above.)

A third objection to Protagoras’ thesis is very quickly stated in Socrates’ two rhetorical questions at 162c2–6. Since Protagoras’ thesis implies that all perceptions are true, it not only has the allegedly absurd consequence that animals’ perceptions are not inferior to humans. It also has the consequence that humans’ perceptions are not inferior to the gods’. This consequence too is now said to be absurd.

As with the first two objections, so here. If we consider divinities and humans just as perceivers, there is no automatic reason to prefer divine perceptions, and hence no absurdity. Plato may well want us to infer that the Greek gods are not different just in respect of being perceivers from humans. But they are different in their powers of judgement about perceptions.

The next four arguments (163a–168c) present counter-examples to the alleged equivalence of knowledge and perception. The fourth observes that, if perception = knowledge, then anyone who perceives an utterance in a given language should have knowledge of that utterance, i.e., understand it—which plainly doesn’t happen. The fifth raises a similar problem about memory and perception: remembering things is knowing them, but not perceiving them. The sixth (the “covered eye”) objection contrasts not perceiving an object (in one sensory modality) with not knowing it . If perception = knowledge, seeing an object with one eye and not seeing it with the other would appear to be a case of the contradictory state of both knowing it and not knowing it. The seventh points out that one can perceive dimly or faintly, clearly or unclearly, but that these adverbial distinctions do not apply to ways of knowing—as they must if knowing is perceiving.

In 165e4–168c5, Socrates sketches Protagoras’s response to these seven objections. Protagoras makes two main points. First, he can meet some of the objections by distinguishing types and occasions of perception. Second, teaching as he understands it is not a matter of getting the pupil to have true rather than false beliefs. Since there are no false beliefs, the change that a teacher can effect is not a change from false belief to true belief or knowledge. Rather, Protagoras’ model of teaching is a therapeutic model. What a good teacher does, according to him, is use arguments (or discourses: logoi ) as a good doctor uses drugs, to replace the state of the soul in which “bad things are and appear” with one in which “good things are and appear.” While all beliefs are true , not all beliefs are beneficial .

A difficulty for Protagoras’ position here is that, if all beliefs are true, then all beliefs about which beliefs are beneficial must be true. But surely, some beliefs about which beliefs are beneficial contradict other beliefs about which beliefs are beneficial; especially if some people are better than others at bringing about beneficial beliefs. (For example, no doubt Plato’s and Protagoras’ beliefs conflict at this point.) This means that Protagoras’ view entails a contradiction of the same sort as the next objection–the famous peritropê —seems to be meant to bring out.

The peritropê (“table-turning”) objection (171a–b) is this. Suppose I believe, as Protagoras does, that “All beliefs are true,” but also admit that “There is a belief that ‘Not all beliefs are true’.” If all beliefs are true, the belief that “Not all beliefs are true” must be true too. But if that belief is true, then by disquotation, not all beliefs are true. So I refute myself by contradicting myself; and the same holds for Protagoras.

The validity of the objection has been much disputed. Burnyeat, Denyer and Sedley all offer reconstructions of the objection that make it come out valid. McDowell and Bostock suggest that although the objection does not prove what it is meant to prove (self-contradiction), it does prove a different point (about self-defeat) which is equally worth making.

Socrates’ ninth objection presents Protagoras’ theory with a dilemma. If the theory is completely general in its application, then it must say that not only what counts as justice in cities, but also what benefits cities, is a relative matter. As Protagoras has already admitted (167a3), it is implausible to say that benefit is a relative notion. But the alternative, which Protagoras apparently prefers, is a conceptual divorce between the notions of justice and benefit, which restrict the application of Protagoras’ theory to the notion of justice. Socrates obviously finds this conceptual divorce unattractive, though he does not, directly, say why. Instead, he offers us the Digression.

An obvious question: what is the Digression for? One answer (defended in Chappell 2004, ad loc.) would be that it is a critique of the society that produces the conceptual divorce between justice and benefit that has just emerged. Socrates draws an extended parallel between two types of character, the philosophical man and the man of rhetoric, to show that it is better to be the philosophical type.

The Digression is “philosophically quite pointless,” according to Ryle 1966: 158. Less dismissively, McDowell 1976: 174 suggests that the Digression serves “a purpose which, in a modern book, might be served by footnotes or an appendix.” Similarly, Cornford 1935 (83) suggests that Plato aims to give the reader some references for anti-relativist arguments that he presents elsewhere: “To argue explicitly against it would perhaps take him too far from the original topic of perception. Instead, he inserts [the Digression], which contains allusions to such arguments in other works of his.”

Perhaps the Digression paints a picture of what it is like to live in accordance with the two different accounts of knowledge, the Protagorean and the Platonist, that Plato is comparing. Thus the Digression shows us what is ethically at stake in the often abstruse debates found elsewhere in the Theaetetus . Its point is that we can’t make a decision about what account of knowledge to accept without making all sorts of other decisions, not only about the technical, logical and metaphysical matters that are to the fore in the rest of the Theaetetus , but also about questions of deep ethical significance. So, for instance, it can hardly be an accident that, at 176c2, the difference between justice and injustice is said to be a difference between knowledge ( gnôsis ) and ignorance ( agnoia ).

Another common question about the Digression is: does it introduce or mention the Platonic Forms? Certainly the Digression uses phrases that are indisputably part of the Middle-Period language for the Forms. If Plato uses the language of the theory of Forms in a passage which is admitted on all sides to allude to the themes of the Republic , it strains credulity to imagine that Plato is not intentionally referring to the Forms in that passage.

On the other hand, as the Revisionist will point out, the Theaetetus does not seem to do much with the Forms that are thus allegedly introduced. But perhaps it would undermine the Unitarian reading of the Theaetetus if the Forms were present in the Digression in the role of paradigm objects of knowledge. For the Unitarian reading, at least on the version that strikes me as most plausible, says that the aim of the Theaetetus is to show that, in the end, we cannot construct a theory of knowledge without the Forms—a claim which is to be proved by trying and failing, three times, to do so. So if the Forms were there in the Digression, perhaps that would be a case of “giving the game away.”

After the Digression Socrates returns to criticising Protagoras’ relativism. His last objection is that there is no coherent way of applying Protagoras’ relativism to judgements about the future.

How might Protagoras counter this objection? Protagoras has already suggested that the past may now be no more than whatever I now remember it to have been (166b). Perhaps he can also suggest that the future is now no more than I now believe it will be. No prediction is ever proved wrong, just as no memory is ever inaccurate. All that happens is it seems to one self at one time that something will be true (or has been true), and seems to another self at another time that something different is true.

But these appeals to distinctions between Protagorean selves—future or past—do not help. Suppose we grant to Protagoras that, when I make a claim about how the future will be, this claim concerns how things will be for my future self . It is just irrelevant to add that my future self and I are different beings. Claims about the future still have a form that makes them refutable by someone’s future experience. If I predict on Monday that on Tuesday my head will hurt, that claim is falsified either if I have no headache on Tuesday, or if, on Tuesday, there is someone who is by convention picked out as my continuant whose head does not hurt.

Similarly with the past. Suppose I know on Tuesday that on Monday I predicted that on Tuesday my head would hurt. It is no help against the present objection for me to reflect, on Tuesday, that I am a different person now from who I was then. My Monday-self can only have meant either that his head would hurt on Tuesday, which was a false belief on his part if he no longer exists on Tuesday; or else that the Tuesday-self would have a sore head. But if the Tuesday-self has no sore head, then my Monday-self made a false prediction, and so must have had a false belief. Either way, the relativist does not escape the objection.

Moreover, this defence of Protagoras does not evade the following dilemma. Either what I mean by claiming (to take an example of Bostock’s) that “The wine will taste raw to me in five years’ time” is literally that. Or else what I mean is just “ It seems to me that the wine will taste raw to me in five years’ time.”

Suppose I mean the former assertion. If the wine turns out not to taste raw five years hence, Protagoras has no defence from the conclusion that I made a false prediction about how things would seem to me in five years. Or suppose I meant the latter assertion. Then I did not make a prediction , strictly speaking, at all; merely a remark about what presently seems to me. Either way, Protagoras loses.

Socrates argues that if Heracleitus’ doctrine of flux is true, then no assertion whatever can properly be made. Therefore (a) Heracleitus’ theory of flux no more helps to prove that knowledge is perception than that knowledge is not perception, and (b) Heracleiteans cannot coherently say anything at all, not even to state their own doctrine.

There are two variants of the argument. On the first of these variants, evident in 181c2–e10, Socrates distinguishes just two kinds of flux or process, namely qualitative alteration and spatial motion, and insists that the Heracleiteans are committed to saying that both are continual. On the second variant, evident perhaps at 182a1, 182e4–5, Socrates distinguishes indefinitely many kinds of flux or process, not just qualitative alteration and motion through space, and insists that the Heracleiteans are committed to saying that every kind of flux is continual.

Now the view that everything is always changing in every way might seem a rather foolish view to take about everyday objects. But, as 182a2–b8 shows, the present argument is not about everyday objects anyway. Plato does not apply his distinction between kinds of change to every sort of object whatever, including everyday objects. He applies it specifically to the objects (if that is the word) of Heracleitean metaphysics. These items are supposed by the Heracleitean to be the reality underlying all talk of everyday objects. It is at the level of these Heracleitean perceivings and perceivers that Plato’s argument against Heracleitus is pitched. And it is not obviously silly to suppose that Heracleitean perceivings and perceivers are constantly changing in every way.

The argument that Socrates presents on the Heracleiteans’ behalf infers from “Everything is always changing in every way” that “No description of anything is excluded.” How does this follow? McDowell 1976: 181–2 finds the missing link in the impossibility of identifications . We cannot (says McDowell) identify a moving sample of whiteness, or of seeing, any longer once it has changed into some other colour, or perception.

But this only excludes re identifications: presumably I can identify the moving whiteness or the moving seeing until it changes, even if this only gives me an instant in which to identify it. This point renders McDowell’s version, as it stands, an invalid argument. If it is on his account possible to identify the moving whiteness until it changes , then it is on his account possible to identify the moving whiteness. But if that is possible, then his argument contradicts itself: for it goes on to deny this possibility.

Some other accounts of the argument also commit this fallacy. Compare Sayre’s account (1969: 94): “If no statement, either affirmative or negative, can remain true for longer than the time taken in its utterance, then no statement can be treated as either true or false, and the cause of communicating with one’s fellow beings must be given up as hopeless.”

Sayre’s argument aims at the conclusion “No statement can be treated as either true or false.” But Sayre goes via the premiss “Any statement remains true no longer than the time taken in its utterance.” If there are statements which are true, even if they are not true for very long, it is not clear why these statements cannot be treated as true, at least in principle (and in practice too, given creatures with the right sensory equipment and sense of time).

McDowell’s and Sayre’s versions of the argument also face the following objection. It is obvious how, given flux, a present-tense claim like “Item X is present” can quickly cease to be true, because e.g., “Item Y is present” comes to replace it. But it isn’t obvious why flux should exclude the possibility of past-tense statements like “Item X flowed into item Y between t 1 and t 2 ,” or of tenseless statements like “Item X is present at t 1 , item Y is present at t 2 .” As Bostock 1988: 105–6 points out, “So long as we do have a language with stable meanings, and the ability to make temporal distinctions, there is no difficulty at all about describing an ever-changing world.”

“So long as” : to make the argument workable, we may suggest that its point is that the meanings of words are exempt from flux. If meanings are not in flux, and if we have access to those meanings, nothing stops us from identifying the whiteness at least until it flows away. But if meanings are in flux too, we will have the result that the argument against Heracleitus actually produces at 183a5: anything at all will count equally well as identifying or not identifying the whiteness. “Unless we recognise some class of knowable entities exempt from the Heracleitean flux and so capable of standing as the fixed meanings of words, no definition of knowledge can be any more true than its contradictory. Plato is determined to make us feel the need of his Forms without mentioning them” (Cornford 1935, 99).

Socrates completes his refutation of the thesis that knowledge is perception by bringing a twelfth and final objection, directed against D1 itself rather than its Protagorean or Heracleitean interpretations. This objection says that the mind makes use of a range of concepts which it could not have acquired, and which do not operate, through the senses: e.g., “existence,” “sameness,” “difference.” So there is a part of thought, and hence of knowledge, which has nothing to do with perception. Therefore knowledge is not perception.

Unitarians and Revisionists will read this last argument against D1 in line with their general orientations. Unitarians will suggest that Socrates’ range of concepts common to the senses is a list of Forms. They will point to the similarities between the image of the senses as soldiers in a wooden horse that Socrates offers at 184d1 ff., and the picture of a Heracleitean self, existing only in its awareness of particular perceptions, that he drew at 156–160.

Revisionists will retort that there are important differences between the Heracleitean self and the wooden-horse self, differences that show that Heracleiteanism is no longer in force in 184–187. They will insist that the view of perception in play in 184–187 is Plato’s own non-Heracleitean view of perception. Thus Burnyeat 1990: 55–56 argues that, since Heracleiteanism has been refuted by 184, “the organs and subjects dealt with [in the Wooden Horse passage] are the ordinary stable kind which continue in being from one moment to the next.” On the other hand, notice that Plato’s equivalent for Burnyeat’s “organs and subjects” is the single word aisthêseis (184d2). On its own, the word can mean either “senses” or “sensings”; but it seems significant that it was the word Plato used at 156b1 for one of the two sorts of Heracleitean “offspring.” Plato speaks of the aisthêseis concealed “as if within a Wooden Horse” as pollai tines (184d1), “indefinitely many.” But while there are indefinitely many Heracleitean sensings , there are not, of course, indefinitely many senses . Indeed even the claim that we have many senses ( pollai ), rather than several ( enioi , tines ), does not sound quite right, either in English or in Greek. This is perhaps why most translators, assuming that aisthêseis means “senses,” put “a number of senses” for pollai tines aisthêseis . Perhaps this is a mistake, and what aisthêseis means here is “Heracleitean sensings.” If so, this explains how the aisthêseis inside any given Wooden Horse can be pollai tines.

If the aisthêseis in the Wooden Horse are Heracleitean sensings , not ordinary, un-Heracleitean senses , this supports the Unitarian idea that 184–187 is contrasting Heracleitean perceiving of particulars with Platonic knowing of the Forms (or knowing of particulars via , and in terms of , the Forms).

Another piece of evidence pointing in the same direction is the similarity between Plato’s list of the “common notions” at Theaetetus 186a and closely contemporary lists that he gives of the Forms, such as the list of Forms ( likeness , multitude , rest and their opposites) given at Parmenides 129d, with ethical additions at Parmenides 130b. There are also the megista genê (“greatest kinds”) of Sophist 254b–258e ( being , sameness , otherness , rest and change ); though whether these genê are Forms is controversial.

7. Second Definition ( D2 ): “Knowledge is True Judgement”: 187b–201c

151–187 has considered and rejected the proposal that knowledge is perception. Sometimes in 151–187 “perception” seems to mean “immediate sensory awareness”; at other times it seems to mean “judgements made about immediate sensory awareness.” The proposal that “Knowledge is immediate sensory awareness” is rejected as incoherent: “Knowledge is not to be found in our bodily experiences, but in our reasonings about those experiences” (186d2). The proposal that “Knowledge is judgement about immediate sensory awareness” raises the question how judgements, or beliefs, can emerge from immediate sensory awareness. Answering this question is the main aim in 187–201.

Empiricists claim that sensation, which in itself has no cognitive content, is the source of all beliefs, which essentially have cognitive content—which are by their very nature candidates for truth or falsity. So unless we can explain how beliefs can be true or false, we cannot explain how there can be beliefs at all. Hence Plato’s interest in the question of false belief. What Plato wants to show in 187–201 is that there is no way for the empiricist to construct contentful belief from contentless sensory awareness alone. The corollary is, of course, that we need something else besides sensory awareness to explain belief. In modern terms, we need irreducible semantic properties. In Plato’s terms, we need the Forms.

In pursuit of this strategy of argument in 187–201, Plato rejects in turn five possible empiricist explanations of how there can be false belief. In the First Puzzle (188a–c) he proposes a basic difficulty for any empiricist. Then he argues that no move available to the empiricist circumvents this basic difficulty, however much complexity it may introduce (the other four Puzzles: 188d–201b). The Fifth Puzzle collapses back into the Third Puzzle, and the Third Puzzle collapses back into the First. The proposal that gives us the Fourth Puzzle is disproved by the counter-examples that make the Fifth Puzzle necessary. As for the Second Puzzle, Plato deploys this to show how empiricism has the disabling drawback that it turns an outrageous sophistical argument into a valid disproof of the possibility of at least some sorts of false belief.

Thus 187–201 continues the critique of perception-based accounts of knowledge that 151–187 began. Contrary to what some—for instance Cornford—have thought, it is no digression from the main path of the Theaetetus . On the contrary, the discussion of false belief is the most obvious way forward.

As Plato stresses throughout the dialogue, it is Theaetetus who is caught in this problem about false belief. It is not Socrates, nor Plato. There is clear evidence at Philebus 38c ff. that false belief (at least of some sorts) was no problem at all to Plato himself (at least at some points in his career). Plato’s question is not “How on earth can there be false judgement?” Rather it is “What sort of background assumptions about knowledge must Theaetetus be making, given that he is puzzled by the question how there can be false judgement?”

Is it only false judgements of identity that are at issue in 187–201, or is it any false judgement? One interpretation of 187–201 says that it is only about false judgements of misidentification. Call this view misidentificationism . The main alternative interpretation of 187–201 says that it is about any and every false judgement. Call this view anti-misidentificationism . The present discussion assumes the truth of anti-misidentificationism; see Chappell 2005: 154–157 for the arguments.

I turn to the detail of the five proposals about how to explain false belief that occupy Stephanus pages 187 to 200 of the dialogue.

The first proposal about how to explain the possibility of false belief is the proposal that false belief occurs when someone misidentifies one thing as another. To believe or judge falsely is to judge, for some two objects O1 and O2 , that O1 is O2 .

How can such confusions even occur? Plato presents a dilemma that seems to show that they can’t. The objects of the judgement, O1 and O2 , must either be known or unknown to the judger x . Suppose one of the objects, say O1 , is unknown to x . In that case, O1 cannot figure in x ’s thoughts at all, since x can only form judgements using objects that he knows. So if O1 is not an object known to x , x cannot make any judgement about O1 . A fortiori, then, x can make no false judgement about O1 either.

If, on the other hand, both O1 and O2 are known to x , then x can perhaps make some judgements about O1 and O2 ; but not the false judgement that “ O1 is O2 .” If x knows O1 and O2 , x must know that O1 is O1 and O2 is O2 , and that it would be a confusion to identify them. So apparently false belief is impossible if the judger does not know both O1 and O2 ; but also impossible if he does know both O1 and O2 .

I cannot mistake X for Y unless I am able to formulate thoughts about X and Y . But I will not be able to formulate thoughts about X and Y unless I am acquainted with X and Y . Being acquainted with X and Y means knowing X and Y ; and anyone who knows X and Y will not mistake them for each other.

Why think this a genuine puzzle? There seem to be plenty of everyday cases where knowing some thing in no way prevents us from sometimes mistaking that thing for something else. One example in the dialogue itself is at 191b (cp. 144c5). It is perfectly possible for someone who knows Socrates to see Theaetetus in the distance, and wrongly think that Theaetetus is Socrates. The First Puzzle does not even get off the ground, unless we can see why our knowledge of X and Y should guarantee us against mistakes about X and Y . Who is the puzzle of 188a–c supposed to be a puzzle for ?

Some authors, such as Bostock, Crombie, McDowell, and White, think that Plato himself is puzzled by this puzzle. Thus Crombie 1963: 111 thinks that Plato advances the claim that any knowledge at all of an object O is sufficient for infallibility about O because he fails to see the difference between “being acquainted with X ” and “being familiar with X .” But to confuse knowing everything about X with knowing enough about X to use the name ‘ X ’ is really a very simple mistake. Plato would not be much of a philosopher if he made this mistake.

If (as is suggested in e.g. Chappell 2004, ad loc.) 187–201 is an indirect demonstration that false belief cannot be explained by empiricism (whether this means a developed philosophical theory, or the instinctive empiricism of some people’s common sense), then it is likely that the First Puzzle states the basic difficulty for empiricism, to which the other four Puzzles look for alternative solutions. The nature of this basic difficulty is not fully, or indeed at all, explained by the First Puzzle. We have to read on and watch the development of the argument of 187–201 to see exactly what the problem is that gives the First Puzzle its bite.

The second proposal says that false judgement is believing or judging ta mê onta , “things that are not” or “what is not.” Socrates observes that if “what is not” is understood as it often was by Greek thinkers, as meaning “nothing,” then this proposal leads us straight into the sophistical absurdity that false beliefs are the same thing as beliefs about nothing (i.e., contentless beliefs). But there can be no beliefs about nothing; and there are false beliefs; so false belief isn’t the same thing as believing what is not.

Some think the Second Puzzle a mere sophistry. Bostock 1988: 165 distinguishes two versions of the sophistry: “On one version, to believe falsely is… to believe what is not ‘just by itself’; on the other version, it is to believe what is not ‘about one of the things which are’”. The argument of the first version, according to Bostock, “is just that there is no such thing as what is not (the case); it is a mere nonentity. But just as you cannot perceive a nonentity, so equally you cannot believe one either.” Bostock proposes the following solution to this problem: “We may find it natural to reply to this argument by distinguishing… propositions [from] facts, situations, states of affairs, and so on. Then we shall say that the things that are believed are propositions, not facts… so a false belief is not directed at a non-existent.”

This raises the question whether a consistent empiricist can admit the existence of propositions. At least one great modern empiricist, Quine 1953: 156–7, thinks not. Plato agrees: he regards a commitment to the existence of propositions as evidence of Platonism, acceptance of the claim that abstract objects (and plenty of them) genuinely exist. So an explanation of false judgement that invoked entities called propositions would be unavailable to the sort of empiricist that Plato has in his sights.

Bostock’s second version of the puzzle makes it an even more transparent sophistry, turning on a simple confusion between the “is” of predication and the “is” of existence. As pointed out above, we can reasonably ask whether Plato made this distinction, or made it as we make it.

If the structure of the Second Puzzle is really as Bostock suggests, then the Second Puzzle is just the old sophistry about believing what is not (cp. Parmenides DK 29B8 , Euthydemus 283e ff., Cratylus 429d, Republic 477a, Sophist 263e ff.). Moreover, on this interpretation of the Second Puzzle, Plato is committed, in his own person and with full generality, to accepting (at least provisionally) a very bad argument for the conclusion that there can be no false belief. It would be nice if an interpretation of the Second Puzzle were available that saw it differently: e.g., as accepted by him only in a context where special reasons make the Second Puzzle very plausible in that context.

One such interpretation is defended e.g., by Burnyeat 1990: 78, who suggests that the Second Puzzle can only work if we accept the “scandalous analogy between judging what is not and seeing or touching what is not there to be seen or touched”: “A model on which judgements relate to the world in the same sort of unstructured way as perceiving or (we may add) naming, will tie anyone in knots when it comes to the question ‘What is a false judgement the judgement/ name of?’. The only available answer, when the judgement is taken as an unstructured whole, appears to be: Nothing.”

Notice that it is the empiricist who will most naturally tend to rely on this analogy. It is the empiricist who finds it natural to assimilate judgement and knowledge to perception, so far as he can. So we may suggest that the Second Puzzle is a mere sophistry for any decent account of false judgement, but a good argument against the empiricist account of false judgement that Plato is attacking. The moral of the Second Puzzle is that empiricism validates the old sophistry because it treats believing or judging as too closely analogous to seeing: 188e4–7. For empiricism judgement, and thought in general, consists in awareness of the ideas that are present to our minds, exactly as they are present to our minds. It cannot consist in awareness of those ideas as they are not ; because (according to empiricism) we are immediately and incorrigibly aware of our own ideas, it can only consist in awareness of those ideas as they are . Nor can judgement consist in awareness of ideas that are not present to our minds, for (according to empiricism) what is not present to our minds cannot be a part of our thoughts. Still less can judgement consist in awareness of ideas that do not exist at all.

The old sophists took false belief as “judging what is not”; they then fallaciously slid from “judging what is not,” to “judging nothing,” to “not judging at all,” and hence concluded that no judgement that was ever actually made was a false judgement. The empiricism that Plato attacks not only repeats this logical slide; it makes it look almost reasonable. The point of the Second Puzzle is to draw out this scandalous consequence.

Literally translated, the third proposal about how to explain the possibility of false belief says that false belief occurs “when someone exchanges ( antallaxamenos ) in his understanding one of the things that are with another of the things that are, and says is ” (189b12–c2).

Perhaps the best way to read this very unclear statement is as meaning that the distinctive addition in the third proposal is the notion of inadvertency . The point of Socrates’ argument is that this addition does not help us to obtain an adequate account of false belief because thought ( dianoia ) has to be understood as an inner process, with objects that we are always fully and explicitly conscious of. If we are fully and explicitly conscious of all the objects of our thoughts, and if the objects of our thoughts are as simple as empiricism takes them to be, there is simply no room for inadvertency. But without inadvertency, the third proposal simply collapses back into the first proposal, which has already been refuted.

The empiricist conception of knowledge that Theaetetus unwittingly brings forth, and which Socrates is scrutinising, takes the objects of thought to be simple mental images which are either straightforwardly available to be thought about, or straightforwardly absent. The First Puzzle showed that there is a general problem for the empiricist about explaining how such images can be confused with each other, or indeed semantically conjoined in any way at all. The Second Puzzle showed that, because the empiricist lacks clear alternatives other than that someone should have a mental image or lack it, he is wide open to the sophistical argument which identifies believing with having a mental image , and then identifies believing what is with having a mental image , too—and so “proves” the impossibility of false belief. The Third Puzzle restricts itself (at least up to 190d7) to someone who has the requisite mental images, and adds the suggestion that he manages to confuse them by a piece of inadvertency. Socrates’ rejoinder is that nothing has been done to show how there can be inadvertent confusions of things that are as simple and unstructured, and as simply grasped or not grasped, as the empiricist takes mental images to be. Just as speech is explicit outer dialogue, so thought is explicit inner dialogue. What the empiricist needs to do to show the possibility of such a confusion is to explain how, on his principles, either speech or thought can fail to be fully explicit and fully “in touch” with its objects, if it is “in touch” with them at all.

In the discussion of the Fourth and Fifth Puzzles, Socrates and Theaetetus together work out the detail of two empiricist attempts to explain just this. It then becomes clearer why Plato does not think that the empiricist can explain the difference between fully explicit and not-fully-explicit speech or thought. Plato thinks that, to explain this, we have to abandon altogether the empiricist conception of thought as the concatenation (somehow) of semantically inert simple mental images. Instead, we have to understand thought as the syntactic concatenation of the genuine semantic entities, the Forms . Mistakes in thought will then be comprehensible as mistakes either about the logical interrelations of the Forms, or about the correct application of the Forms to the sensory phenomena.

The Wax Tablet passage offers us a more explicit account of the nature of thought, and its relationship with perception. The story now on offer says explicitly that perception relates to thought roughly as Humean “impressions” relate to Humean “ideas” (191d; compare Hume, First Enquiry II). The objects of perception, as before, are a succession of constantly-changing immediate awarenesses. The objects of thought, it is now added, are those objects of perception to which we have chosen to give a measure of stability by imprinting them on the wax tablets in our minds. (The image of memory as writing in the mind had currency in Greek thought well before Plato’s time: see e.g. Aeschylus, Eumenides 275.)

This new spelling-out of the empiricist account of thought seems to offer new resources for explaining the possibility of false belief. The new explanation can say that false belief occurs when there is a mismatch, not between two objects of thought , nor between two objects of perception , but between one object of each type.

This proposal faces a simple and decisive objection. No one disputes that there are false beliefs that cannot be explained as mismatches of thought and perception: e.g., false beliefs about arithmetic. The Wax Tablet does not explain how such false beliefs happen; indeed it entails that they can’t happen. Such mistakes are confusions of two objects of thought, and the Wax Tablet model does not dispute the earlier finding that there can be no such confusions. So the Wax Tablet model fails.

There is of course plenty more that Plato could have said in criticism of the Wax Tablet model. Most obviously, he could have pointed out the absurdity of identifying any number with any individual’s thought of that number (195e9 ff.); especially when the numerical thought in question is no more than an ossified perception. In the present passage Plato is content to refute the Wax Tablet by the simplest and shortest argument available: so he does not make this point. But perhaps the point is meant to occur to the reader; for the same absurdity reappears in an even more glaring form in the Aviary passage.

If we had a solution to the very basic problem about how the empiricist can get any content at all out of sensation, then the fourth proposal might show how the empiricist could explain false belief involving perception. The fifth and last proposal about how to explain the possibility of false belief attempts to remedy the fourth proposal’s incapacity—which Plato says refutes it, 196c5–7—to deal with cases of false belief involving no perception, such as false arithmetical beliefs.

It attempts this by deploying a distinction between knowledge that someone merely has (latent knowledge) and knowledge that he is actually using (active knowledge) . (Perhaps Plato is now exploring “the intermediate stages between knowing and not knowing” mentioned at 188a2–3.) The suggestion is that false belief occurs when someone wants to use some item of latent knowledge in his active thought, but makes a wrong selection from among the items that he knows latently.

If this proposal worked it would cover false arithmetical belief. But the proposal does not work, because it is regressive. If there is a problem about the very possibility of confusing two things, it is no answer to this problem to suppose that for each thing there is a corresponding item of knowledge, and that what happens when two things are confused is really that the two corresponding items of knowledge are confused (200a–b).

The Aviary rightly tries to explain false belief by complicating our picture of belief. But it complicates in the wrong way and the wrong place. It is no help to complicate the story by throwing in further objects of the same sort as the objects that created the difficulty about false belief in the first place. What is needed is a different sort of object for thought: a kind of object that can be thought of under different aspects (say, as “the sum of 5 and 7,” or as “the integer 12”). There are no such aspects to the “items of knowledge” that the Aviary deals in. As with the conception of the objects of thought and knowledge that we found in the Wax Tablet, it is this lack of aspects that dooms the Aviary’s conception of the objects of knowledge too. Like the Wax Tablet, the Aviary founders on its own inability to accommodate the point that thought cannot consist merely in the presentation of a series of inert “objects of thought.” Whether these objects of thought are mental images drawn from perception or something else, the thinking is not so much in the objects of thought as in what is done with those objects (186d2–4).

We may illustrate this by asking: When the dunce who supposes that 5 + 7 = 11 decides to activate some item of knowledge to be the answer to “What is the sum of 5 and 7?,” which item of knowledge does he thus decide to activate? At first only two answers seem possible: either he decides to activate 12, or he decides to activate 11. If he decides to activate 12, then we cannot explain the fact that what he actually does is activate 11, except by saying that he mistakes the item of knowledge which is 11 for the item of knowledge which is 12. But this mistake is the very mistake ruled out as impossible right at the beginning of the inquiry into false belief (188a–c). Alternatively, if he decides to activate 11, then we have to ask why he decides to do this. The most plausible answer to that question is: “Because he believes falsely that 5 + 7 = 11.” But as noted above, if he has already formed this false belief, within the account that is supposed to explain false belief, then a regress looms.

In fact, the correct answer to the question “Which item of knowledge does the dunce decide to activate?” is neither “12” nor “11.” It is “ that number which is the sum of 5 and 7.” But this answer does not save the Aviary theorist from the dilemma just pointed out; for it is not available to him. To be able to give this answer, the Aviary theorist would have to be able to distinguish “that number which is the sum of 5 and 7” from “12.” But since “12” is “ that number which is the sum of 5 and 7,” this distinction cannot be made by anyone who takes the objects of thought to be simple in the way that the Aviary theorist seems to.

At 199e1 ff. Theaetetus suggests an amendment to the Aviary. This is that we might have items of ignorance in our heads as well as items of knowledge. As Socrates remarks, these ignorance-birds can be confused with knowledge-birds in just the same way as knowledge-birds can be confused with each other. So the addition does not help.

At 200d–201c Socrates argues more directly against D2 . He offers a counter-example to the thesis that knowledge is true belief. A skilled lawyer can bring jurymen into a state of true belief without bringing them into a state of knowledge; so knowledge and true belief are different states.

McDowell 1976: 227–8 suggests that this swift argument “contradicts the most characteristic expositions of the Theory of Forms, which indicate that the title ‘knowledge’ should be reserved for a relation between the mind and the Forms untainted by any reliance on perception.” By contrast Plato here tells us, quite unambiguously, that the jury are persuaded into a state of true belief “about things which only someone who sees them can know” (201b8). This implies that there can be knowledge which is entirely reliant on perception. (One way out of this is to deny that Plato ever thought that knowledge is only of the Forms, as opposed to thinking that knowledge is paradigmatically of the Forms. For this more tolerant Platonist view about perception see e.g. Philebus 58d–62d, and Timaeus 27d ff.)

The jury argument seems to be a counter-example not only to D2 but also to D3 , the thesis that knowledge is true belief with an account (provided we allow that the jury “have an account”).

A third problem about the jury argument is that Plato seems to offer two incompatible explanations of why the jury don’t know: first that they have only a limited time to hear the arguments (201b3, 172e1); and second that their judgement is second-hand (201b9).

8. Third Definition ( D3 ): “Knowledge is True Judgement With an Account”: 201d–210a

Theaetetus’ third proposal about how to knowledge is ( D3 ) that it is true belief with an account ( meta logou alêthê doxan ).

D3 apparently does nothing at all to solve the main problems that D2 faced. Besides the jurymen counter-example just noted, 187–201 showed that we could not define knowledge as true belief unless we had an account of false belief. This problem has not just evaporated in 201–210. It will remain as long as we propose to define knowledge as true belief plus anything. Significantly, this does not seem to bother Plato—as we might expect if Plato is not even trying to offer an acceptable definition of knowledge, but is rather undermining unacceptable definitions.

One crucial question about Theaetetus 201–210 is the question whether the argument is concerned with objectual or propositional knowledge. This is a basic and central division among interpretations of the whole passage 201–210, but it is hard to discuss it properly without getting into the detail of the Dream Theory: see section 8a.

A second question, which arises often elsewhere in the Theaetetus , is whether the argument’s appearance of aporia reflects genuine uncertainty on Plato’s part, or is rather a kind of literary device. Is Plato thinking aloud, trying to clarify his own view about the nature of knowledge, as Revisionists suspect? Or is he using an aporetic argument only to smoke out his opponents, as Unitarians think?

The evidence favours the latter reading. There are a significant number of other passages where something very like Theaetetus’ claim ( D3 ) that knowledge is “true belief with an account” is not only discussed, but actually defended: for instance, Meno 98a2, Phaedo 76b5–6, Phaedo 97d–99d2, Symposium 202a5–9, Republic 534b3–7, and Timaeus 51e5. So it appears that, in the Theaetetus , Plato cannot be genuinely puzzled about what knowledge can be. Nor can he genuinely doubt his own former confidence in one version of D3 . If he does have a genuine doubt or puzzle of this sort, it is simply incredible that he should say what he does say in 201–210 without also expressing it.

What Plato does in 201–210 is: present a picture (Socrates’ Dream) of how things may be if D3 is true (201c–202c); raise objections to the Dream theory which are said (206b12) to be decisive (202c–206c); and present and reject three further suggestions about the meaning of logos , and so three more versions of D3 (206c–210a). But none of these four interpretations of D3 is Plato’s own earlier version of D3 , which says that knowledge = true belief with an account of the reason why the true belief is true . If what Plato wants to tell us in Theaetetus 201–210 is that he no longer accepts any version of D3 , not even his own version, then it is extraordinary that he does not even mention his own version, concentrating instead on versions of D3 so different from Plato’s version as to be obviously irrelevant to its refutation.

Unitarians can suggest that Plato’s strategy is to refute what he takes to be false versions of D3 so as to increase the logical pressure on anyone who rejects Plato’s version of D3 . In particular, he wants to put pressure on the empiricist theories of knowledge that seem to be the main target of the Theaetetus . What Plato wants to show is, not only that no definition of knowledge except his own, D3 , is acceptable, but also that no version of D3 except his own is acceptable.

Rather as Socrates offered to develop D1 in all sorts of surprising directions, so now he offers to develop D3 into a sophisticated theory of knowledge. This theory, usually known as the “Dream of Socrates” or the “Dream Theory,” posits two kinds of existents, complexes and simples, and proposes that “an account” means “an account of the complexes that analyses them into their simple components.” Thus “knowledge of x ” turns out to mean “true belief about x with an account of x that analyses x into its simple components.”

Taken as a general account of knowledge, the Dream Theory implies that knowledge is only of complexes, and that there can be no knowledge of simples. Socrates attacks this implication.

A common question about the Dream Theory is whether it is concerned with objectual or propositional knowledge. Those who take the Dream Theory to be concerned with propositional knowledge include Ryle 1990: 27–30: “from 201 onwards Plato concentrates on ‘know’ ( connaître ): [Socrates’ Dream] is a logician’s theory, a theory about the composition of truths and falsehoods.” Those who take the Dream Theory to be concerned with objectual knowledge include White 1976: 177, and Crombie 1963: II: 41–42; also Bostock 1988. A third way of taking the Dream Theory, which may well be the most promising interpretation, is to take it as a Logical Atomism : as a theory which founds an account of propositional structure on an account of the concatenation of simple objects of experience or acquaintance such as “sense data.”

The Logical-Atomist reading of the Dream Theory undercuts the propositional/objectual distinction. On this reading, the Dream Theory claims that simple, private objects of experience are the elements of the proposition; thus, the Dream Theory is both a theory about the structure of propositions and a theory about simple and complex objects. It claims in effect that a proposition’s structure is that of a complex object made up out of simple objects, where these simple objects are conceived in the Russellian manner as objects of inner perception or acquaintance, and the complexes which they compose are conceived in the phenomenalist manner as (epistemological and/ or semantic) constructs out of those simple objects.

This supposition makes good sense of the claim that we ourselves are examples of complexes (201e2: “the primary elements ( prôta stoikheia ) of which we and everything else are composed…”). If the Dream theorist is a Logical Atomist, he will think that there is a clear sense in which people, and everything else, are composed out of sense data. He will also think that descriptions of objects, too, are complexes constructed in another way out of the immediately available simples of sensation.

For such a theorist, epistemology and semantics alike rest upon the foundation provided by the simple objects of acquaintance. Both thought and meaning consist in the construction of complex objects out of those simple objects. Philosophical analysis, meanwhile, consists in stating how the complexes involved in thought and meaning are constructed out of simples. This statement involves, amongst other things, dividing down to and enumerating the (simple) parts of such complexes.

What then is the relation of the Dream Theory to the problems posed for empiricism by the discussion of D2 in 187–201? The fundamental problem for empiricism, as we saw, is the problem how to get from sensation to content : the problem of how we could start with bare sense-data, and build up out of them anything that deserved to be called meaning . Plato thinks that there is a good answer to this, though it is not an empiricist answer. Sense experience becomes contentful when it is understood and arranged according to the structures that the Forms give it. So to understand sense experience is, in the truest sense, “to give an account” for it.

The empiricist cannot offer this answer to the problem of how to get from sensation to content without ceasing to be an empiricist. What the empiricist can do is propose that content arises out of sets of sense experiences. We get to the level of belief and knowledge only when we start to consider such sets: before that we are at the level only of perception. Our beliefs, couched in expressions that refer to and quantify over such sets, will then become knowledge (a) when they are true, and (b) when we understand the full story of their composition out of such sets.

If this is the point of the Dream Theory, then the best answer to the question “Whose is the Dream Theory?” is “It belongs to the empiricist whom Plato is attacking.”

The Dream Theory says that knowledge of O is true belief about O plus an account of O ’s composition. If O is not composite, O cannot be known, but only “perceived” (202b6).

Socrates’ main strategy in 202d8–206c2 is to attack the Dream’s claim that complexes and elements are distinguishable in respect of knowability. To this end he deploys a dilemma. A complex, say a syllable, is either (a) no more than its elements (its letters), or (b) something over and above those elements.

202d8–203e1 shows that unacceptable consequences follow from alternative (a), that a complex is no more than its elements. If I am to know a syllable SO , and that syllable is no more than its elements, then I cannot know the syllable SO without also knowing its elements S and O . Indeed, it seems that coming to know the parts S and O is both necessary and sufficient for coming to know the syllable SO . But if that is right, and if the letter/syllable relation models the element/complex relation, then if any complex is knowable , its elements will be knowable too; and if any complex’s elements are unknowable , then the complex will be unknowable too. This result contradicts the Dream Theory.

203e2–205e8 shows that unacceptable consequences follow from alternative (b), that a complex is something over and above its elements. In that case, to know the syllable is to know something for which knowledge of the elements is not sufficient. The syllable turns out to be “a single Idea that comes to be out of the fitted-together elements” (204a1–2). But then the syllable does not have the elements as parts: if it did, that would compromise its singularity. And if the elements are not the parts of the syllable, nothing else can be. So the syllable has no parts, which makes it as simple as an element. Thus if the element is unknowable, the syllable must be unknowable too. This result contradicts the Dream Theory too.

Finally, in 206a1–c2, Plato makes a further, very simple, point against the Dream Theory. Our own experience of learning letters and syllables shows that it is both more basic and more important to know elements than complexes, not vice versa as the Dream Theory implies. The thesis that the complexes are knowable, the elements unknowable, is false to our experience, in which “knowledge of the elements is primary” (Burnyeat 1990:192).

The refutation of the Dream Theory’s attempt to spell out what it might be like for D3 to be true is followed by three attempts to give an account of what a logos is. The first attempt to give an account of “account” takes logos just to mean “speech” or “statement.” This is deemed obviously insufficient (206c1–206e3).

A second attempted explanation of “ logos of O” takes it as “enumeration of the elements of O .” The logos is a statement of the elements of the object of knowledge. You have knowledge of something when, in addition to your true belief about it, you are able also to “go through the elements” of that thing.

Plato’s objection to this proposal (208b) is that it leaves open the possibility that someone could count as having knowledge of the name “Theaetetus” even if they could do no more than write out the letters of the name “Theaetetus” in the right order. Since such a person can enumerate the elements of the complex, i.e., the letters of the name (207c8–d1), he has an account. Since he can arrange those letters in their correct order (208a9–10), he also has true belief. For all that, insists Plato, he does not have knowledge of the name “Theaetetus.”

Why not, we might ask? To see the answer we should bring in what Plato says about syllables at 207d8–208a3. Suppose someone could enumerate the letters of “Theaetetus,” and could give their correct order, and yet knew nothing about syllables. This person wouldn’t count as knowing “Theaetetus” because he would have no understanding of the principles that get us from ordered letters to names. Those principles are principles about how letters form syllables, and how syllables form names. A person who can state only the letters of “Theaetetus” and their order has no awareness of these principles.

To put it a modern way, a robot or an automatic typewriter might be able to reproduce or print the letters of “Theaetetus” correctly and in order. It might even be able to store such a correct ordering in its electronic memory. That would not show that such a machine understood how to spell “Theaetetus,” any more than the symbol-manipulating capacities of the man in Searle’s Chinese Room show that he understands Chinese. What is missing is an awareness of bridging or structuring principles, rules explaining how we get from strings of symbols, via syllables, to representations of Greek names.

Knowledge of such bridging principles can reasonably be called knowledge of why the letters of “Theaetetus” are what they are. So it is plausible to suggest that the moral of the argument is to point us to the need for an account in the sense of an explanation “Why?,” and so to the version of D3 that Plato himself accepts.

The third proposed account of logos says that to give the logos of O is to cite the sêmeion or diaphora of O . In the Wax Tablet passage, sêmeion meant ‘imprint’; in the present passage, it means the ‘sign’ or diagnostic feature wherein x differs from everything else, or everything else of O ’s own kind. So, presumably, knowledge of (say) Theaetetus consists in true belief about Theaetetus plus an account of what differentiates Theaetetus from every other human.

Socrates offers two objections to this proposal. First, if knowledge of Theaetetus requires a mention of his sêmeion , so does true belief about Theaetetus. Second, to possess “an account of Theaetetus’ sêmeion ” must mean either (a) having true belief about that sêmeion, or else (b) having knowledge of it. But it has already been pointed out that any true belief, if it is to qualify as being about Theaetetus at all, must already be true belief about his sêmeion. So interpretation (a) has the result that knowledge of Theaetetus = true belief about Theaetetus’ sêmeion + true belief about Theaetetus’ sêmeion . As for (b): if we want to know what knowledge is, it is no help to be told that knowledge of O = something else + knowledge of the sêmeion of O . We still need to know what knowledge of the sêmeion of O is. Nor will it help us to be launched on a vicious regress: as we will be if we are told that knowledge of the sêmeion of O = something else + knowledge of the sêmeion of the sêmeion of O .

This is where the argument ends, and Socrates leaves to meet his accusers.

The Theaetetus is an extended attack on certain assumptions and intuitions about knowledge that the intelligent man-in-the-street—Theaetetus, for instance—might find initially attractive, and which some philosophers known to Plato—Protagoras and Heracleitus, for instance—had worked up into complex and sophisticated philosophical theories. Basic to all these assumptions and intuitions, which here have been grouped together under the name “empiricism,” is the idea that knowledge is constructed out of perception and perception alone.

The first part of the Theaetetus attacks the idea that knowledge could be simply identified with perception. Perceptions alone have no semantic structure. So if this thesis was true, it would be impossible to state it.

The second part attacks the suggestion that knowledge can be defined as true belief, where beliefs are supposed to be semantically-structured concatenations of sensory impressions. Against this Plato argues that, unless something can be said to explain how impressions can be concatenated so as to give them semantic structure, there is no reason to grant that the distinction between true and false applies to such beliefs any more than it does to perceptions.

Finally, in the third part of the Theaetetus , an attempt is made to meet this challenge, and present some explanation of how semantic structures can arise out of mere perceptions or impressions. The proposed explanation is the Dream Theory, a theory interestingly comparable to Russellian Logical Atomism, which takes both propositions and objects to be complexes “logically constructed” out of simple sensory impressions. On this conception, knowledge will come about when someone is capable not only of using such logical constructions in thought, but of understanding how they arise from perception.

Socrates’ basic objection to this theory is that it still gives no proper explanation of how this logical construction takes place. Without such an explanation, there is no good reason to treat the complexes that are thus logically constructed as anything other than simples in their own right. We need to know how it can be that, merely by conjoining perceptions in the right way, we manage to achieve a degree of semantic structure that (for instance) makes it possible to refer to things in the world , such as Theaetetus. But this is not explained simply by listing all the simple perceptions that are so conjoined. Nor—and this is where we reach the third proposal of 208b11–210a9—is it explained by fixing on any of those perceptions in particular, and taking it to be the special mark of Theaetetus whereby reference to Theaetetus is fixed.

The third proposal about how to understand logos faces the difficulty that, if it adds anything at all to differentiate knowledge of O from true belief about O , then what it adds is a diagnostic quality of O . If there is a problem about how to identify O , there is a problem about how to identify the diagnostic quality too. This launches a vicious regress.

One way of preventing this regress is to argue that the regress is caused by the attempt to work up a definition of knowledge exclusively out of empiricist materials. Hence there is no way of avoiding such a vicious regress if you are determined to try to define knowledge on an exclusively empiricist basis. The right response is to abandon that attempt. Knowledge is indeed indefinable in empiricist terms. In those terms, it has no logos . In those terms, therefore, knowledge itself is unknowable.

The official conclusion of the Theaetetus is that we still do not know how to define knowledge. Even on the most sceptical reading, this is not to say that we have not learned anything about what knowledge is like. As Theaetetus says (210b6), he has given birth to far more than he had in him.

And as many interpreters have seen, there may be much more to the ending than that. It may even be that, in the last two pages of the Theaetetus , we have seen hints of Plato’s own answer to the puzzle. Perhaps understanding has emerged from the last discussion, as wisdom did from 145d–e, as the key ingredient without which no true beliefs alone can even begin to look like they might count as knowledge. Perhaps it is only when we, the readers, understand this point—that epistemological success in the last resort depends on having epistemological virtue—that we begin not only to have true beliefs about what knowledge is, but to understand knowledge.

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• Wittgenstein, L., 1961, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , Pears and McGuinness (trans.), London: Routledge.
• Wittgenstein, L., 1958, The Blue and Brown Books , Oxford: Blackwell.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Original texts of Plato’s Dialogues (Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University)

Plato | Plato: method and metaphysics in the Sophist and Statesman | Plato: middle period metaphysics and epistemology | Platonism: in metaphysics

Acknowledgments

The authors and SEP editors would like to thank Branden Kosch for noticing a point of Greek grammar in need of correction.

Copyright © 2019 by Sophie-Grace Chappell

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Plato’s Theory of Empathy

ONE of my favourite quotes comes from Plato – “The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world,” writes Jonathan Edwards MP. I have always found this useful in politics as a means of understanding the views of my opponents and of finding the middle ground where possible. Regrettably, politics today has lost its intellectual integrity as the age of social media and the current culture war promotes narrow true believers unable to look further than their noses. As the political debate around the constitutional question in Wales continues to polarise, those of us who support Welsh independence would do well to consider how the unionist position has developed, particularly under the Premiership of Boris Johnson. What we are now witnessing is a far more aggressive form of unionism, fuelled by the growth of English nationalism. Brexit is best understood in this context. Reassertion of Westminster control of the Celtic periphery has now become deliberate British Government policy under the guise of saving the union. This changes the nature of unionism quite considerably. This is particularly the case for the Labour party in Wales, who have preferred to convince themselves that Wales is an equal partner within the Union. This has never been the case of course, but that fantasy has now surely been put to bed. This new form of aggressive unionism is based on English exceptionalism which has consumed the Tory party, but also increasingly the Labour party, who are desperately trying to find their own narrative to penetrate the rapid growth of English nationalism. The best Kier Starmer has come up with so far has been to try and out English nat the Tories – a strategy doomed to fail as he fertilises the dynamics eroding Labour support. Not that I want to offer advice to unionists in Wales, but they would do well to quickly analyse the forces driving the growth in support for Welsh independence and realise their own role in fuelling what they purport to oppose. In politics as in physics, action leads to reaction – open attacks on the integrity of the Welsh constitution by Westminster is one of the main driving forces behind the growth of Yes Cymru. When the Secretary of State for Wales labels the Welsh Government as being of ‘little status’, that riles up those of us who don’t even support the current Welsh Government because it is an attack on Wales as a nation. It also undermines the cause of unionism in Wales as it torpedoes the credibility of the Labour narrative. Labour themselves are also guilty of undermining their own brand of unionism by meekly accepting what’s coming at Wales from Westminster. It is no wonder that opinion polls indicate that a majority of Labour voters now support independence. Welsh unionism faces an ideological crisis. There are competing and incoherent visions of what Welsh unionism means. Meanwhile, the pro-independence forces can articulate a definitive vision of hope for the future. # Labour and the Tories as the two main unionist parties have always been able to game the electoral system in favour of the Union. As the main division line in Welsh politics quickly polarises on the national question that hegemony will become increasingly challenged. On the ground, Labour is trying to appeal to both sides of the national question in the run-up to the forthcoming election. In the aftermath, the unionist parties may look to construct a unified vision of unionism. With politics in Wales, as in Scotland, now primarily divided on the national question the most natural coalition after the election would be a deal between both main unionist parties. If Labour and the Tories want to save their ‘precious union’ it may be the only card they have to play. To return to Plato, I suspect the arrogance inherent in Welsh unionism lacks the empathetic understanding required to address the aspirations of those amassing behind the banners of Yes Cymru. Ultimately, both parties want to shut Wales into this unequal union – the question for the people of Wales is, will we let them?

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Digital learning topics.

Empathy is important because it allows us to connect with each other and build understanding that can change our perspective and open our eyes to the experiences of others. These shifts are critical to improving race relations and addressing inequality.

There is an important distinction between empathy and sympathy. Sympathy is defined as a feeling of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune. It is simply caring that somebody is in pain or suffering. Empathy goes beyond that and involves a deeper connection with someone. Empathy is defined as the experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective. It refers to the ability to feel or emotionally relate to another person's pain and suffering. When allies in the fight for racial equity have empathy for persons of color, they better understand the issues are therefore more personally invested and equipped to take action.

"One doesn't have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient." — Charles M. Blow

RISE Perspective

My heart is with you, my pain is for you.

By Madeline Bachelier

For the past couple of weeks, I have woken up each morning feeling heavy.

My thoughts and emotions have spiraled seeing the amount of information, resources, and support sparked from the recent deaths of Ahmaud Arbery , Breonna Taylor , and George Floyd . I see and feel the amount of energy. The pure energy of limitless work to demand accountability for police brutality, elevate the movement and voices of Black Lives Matter and further educate ourselves on issues that continue to steal the opportunities and lives of innocent people.

I am a Mexican-American woman who grew up learning two cultures, two languages, and practically two different ways of life. Although a person of color, my experiences dealing with implicit bias, microaggressions, prejudice and racism do not compare to the daily challenges my Black friends and peers endure.

Knowing that, my tears and heavy chest left me thinking, "Why am I grieving so much? Why are my emotions at an all-time high with anger and frustration?"

At the time I did not realize that the pain and frustrations I felt were moments of empathy. Truthfully, as a way to make sense of all this, I thought my emotions were inappropriate and that I should channel that energy into action.

But then I read this piece from Morgan Harper Nichols, writer, musician, and artist who eloquently expressed empathy as:

Let me hold the door for you.

I may have never walked

A mile in your shoes,

But I can see that

Your soles are worn

And your strength is torn

Under the weight of a story

I have never lived before.

So let me hold the door for you.

After all you've walked through,

It's the least I can do. – Morgan Harper Nichols

As I processed the news each day, seeing protestors take to the streets throughout the nation, and listen to the challenges my friends and colleagues have been facing, I could not help but think how much empathy reveals who we are as people.

Empathy says, "I see you, and I feel for you." Empathy is the first step to connection, and has no bounds in its ability to shift behaviors and convey a collective sense of support that stretches beyond all limits.

When we think about practicing empathy what comes to mind? In most cases, empathy does not always have to look the same across different situations or be expressed to the same degree. It is important to think of empathy through other acts of appreciation, as well.

RISE teaches four skills to empathy, introduced by Dr. Brené Brown :

Perspective Taking

• Staying out of judgement
• Recognizing emotions in others
• Communication to others that you recognize their emotion

We may not always fully understand what someone is going through, but we can first try to connect with them through practicing these four skills. If at one point you also experienced the same feeling but not necessarily in the same situation, that in a sense is building empathy.

Empathy leads to education, and until you expose yourself to different perspectives and experiences that may challenge your privilege and how you use it, you may just live in a comfort zone that simply expresses sympathy, but never really leads to action.

A study published by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley suggests, "cognitive empathy," or knowing how another person feels and thinks is not enough to inspire action. What does is, ‘'emotional empathy," which urges feeling the same emotions of other people as if they are your own.

For years, athletes have evoked and expressed different forms of empathy through their activism as a way to raise awareness around important social justice issues.

In 2014, for example, NBA stars such as LeBron James, Derrick Rose, and Kobe Bryant wore "I Can't Breathe" T-shirts during warm-ups to raise awareness of police brutality following the killing of Eric Garner in New York. Social media posts of athletes wearing these shirts have resurfaced in light of Floyd's murder, and athletes like James and countless others continue to speak out on matters of race and social justice.

Nationwide movements cannot grow with only those directly impacted by the cause. They require diverse support and a coalition of people and groups. That, is built with empathy. It's empathy that compels people to fight for the plights of others and sparks momentum to address critical social issues. Athletes wearing "I Can't Breathe" t-shirts or sharing their personal stories puts a human voice and face on the fight against racism and police brutality, and helps those who may not be personally impacted by those issues connect to the cause.

But one doesn't need a national platform to build or evoke empathy. In your own school, community or office (virtual or in-person), anyone can be a leader in this space.

Diversity and inclusion expert, Dr. Janice Gassam (2018) lists different tactics for leaders to build empathy in and out of the workplace:

• Listen. Research indicates that listening to other people from different walks of life talk about their experiences and journey through life, difficulties, hardships, and triumphs can impact our empathy levels.
• Slow Down. Listening is very important, but unless we slow down and stop multi-tasking, it is difficult to really hear the differing experiences of others.
• Be Curious. Individuals that are more curious tend to also be more empathetic. Make a concerted effort to interact with people who are different than you, and take time to learn about their stories. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Asking questions allows the other person to feel like their voice is heard and valued.
• Volunteer. The act of volunteering may actually increase our empathy levels. Organizations should incorporate volunteering opportunities into the corporate structure to allow employees to feel like they are making a difference and impact.

The purpose behind practicing empathy can mean working towards a common goal. At RISE, we recognize starting with empathy opens up conversations that build trust and confidence. Moreover, empathy reaches a level of connection that we often strive for within our relationships with family, friends, and our community.

For me, showing vulnerability and empathy towards someone and the struggles they face reveals another kind of understanding. The kind that screams, my heart is with you, my pain for you, and I am motivated to advocate for you.

Madeline Bachelier is Manager, Partnerships at RISE. In this role, she works to expand RISE's relations with college athletic departments and professional teams, and helps seek new opportunities to empower the sports community to be leaders on matters of race relations, diversity and inclusion. She holds a Bachelor's Degree in Marketing from the University of Arizona.

Sport, Empathy & Law Enforcement: A RISE Critical Conversation

Watch as top athletes and police officers from around the country discuss empathy and law enforcement and how sport can play a role in bringing communities together. Moderated by Bonnie Bernstein, the conversation features:

• Renee Montgomery , 2x WNBA Champion
• Jaiden Lars-Woodbey , Florida State Football Student-Athlete
• Officer Luis Crespo , Chicago PD
• Officer Shannon Finis , Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD
• Officer Michael Richardson , Detroit PD

Empathy vs. Sympathy

Dr Brené Brown reminds us that empathy for others is only possible if we are brave enough to really get in touch with our own feelings.

One of the key skills of practicing empathy is perspective taking. Perspective taking is the process through which one is able to see the viewpoint of another, understanding their feelings, intentions, thoughts or view of a particular situation. Watch this video to learn more about perspective taking.

Complete this activity to learn more about empathy.

Learn More to Do More

Explore the difference between sympathy and empathy and recognize and practice the difference between problem solving and empathetic listening in our "Practicing Empathy" activity .

In course 1, we made the important distinction between empathy and sympathy. Sympathy is defined as a feeling of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune. It is simply caring that somebody is in pain or suffering. Empathy goes beyond that and involves a deeper connection. Empathy is defined as the experience of understanding another person's condition from their perspective. It refers to the ability to feel or emotionally relate to another person's pain and suffering. Empathy allows us to connect with each other and build understanding that can change our perspective and open our eyes to the experiences of others. These shifts are critical to improving race relations and addressing inequality. In course 2, we examine what empathy looks like as others put it into practice. We challenge all of us to consider using empathy more as we navigate the world. While a hard task, it can help us foster and build connection when there is currently so much division.

"Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding." — Bill Bullard

Too often when we make mistakes, we allow shame and our ego to drive us to double down, refusing to consider the hurt or challenges our actions may have created.

In this personal essay, Kyle Larson reflects on his experiences since using a racial slur in March. In it, he shares some of the many important lessons that he took away from that moment. He talks about his ignorance, personal growth and accountability. One of the most important things he shares via his piece is perhaps not discussed as explicitly. Kyle shares and exemplifies the skill of empathy and perspective taking, as he engages a wide range of persons and tries to understand their perspectives. His personal journey serves as a great example of the work and reflection necessary as we have tough conversations about race, racism and diversity and inclusion more broadly.

Kyle Larson: My Lessons Learned

By Kyle Larson

Back in June, two days before the NASCAR doubleheader weekend at Pocono Raceway, I found myself less than 100 miles away in a classroom in Philadelphia. Although the track was a short drive north up I-476, I wouldn't be going in that direction. It might as well have been on the moon.

Ten weeks earlier, I had said the N-word on a public channel before an esports race. In an instant, my career was shattered. I was rightly suspended by NASCAR and fired from my job with a top-tier team. I jeopardized the livelihoods of the crew members who had poured their careers into building me fast racecars. My fans were upset. In an instant, I turned a lot of lives upside down and destroyed my own reputation.

Anyone who has massively let people down knows what the worst part of all this is. As I sat in that classroom, less than two hours from my previous, comfortable life, I looked across at a group of people who had once supported me and were now completely and totally disappointed.

I was at the Urban Youth Racing School, which exposes kids – many of whom are Black – to opportunities in motorsports. I had visited the school a few times in the past, spoken with students, hosted them at the track and attended a few of their end-of-year awards ceremonies. I loved their work and stayed in contact. I was running a sprint car – the only type of racing I've been able to do – down the road in Harrisburg, so I made the three-hour drive to Philly to reconnect with the owners, Anthony and Michelle Martin, and one of their students, Jysir.

Last October, Jysir celebrated with me and my team in victory lane when I won the NASCAR race at Dover. He was one of the many people I'd hurt, and he wanted to know why this happened. So did his mom. And they didn't just want to hear it from me over the phone or on a Zoom call. It needed to be face-to-face. I was honest with them. We talked about difficult subjects for more than two hours, and I spent a lot of time listening. Michelle educated me on the journey of Black people in America and the ugly history of racism and derogatory slurs. I offered my apologies to Jysir, his mom and the Martins for the pain I caused. Instead of the anger I expected, what I got in return was empathy.

I'll tell you what I told them.

On the night of Sunday, April 12, 2020, when the sports world was stopped because of the pandemic, I said the N-word over a microphone before an online race. Did I know the whole world could hear me in that moment? No, I did not – I thought it was a private channel. So when I tell people that I wasn't in the habit of saying the word and they roll their eyes in response, I don't blame them. I get it.

Auto racing is my passion. During the NASCAR off-season, I've sometimes competed overseas. On one of these trips, I was around a group that used the N-word casually, almost like a greeting. Of course, it doesn't matter where this happened, how the word was used or what the people around me did. The fact is that the word was said in my presence and I allowed it to happen unchecked. I was ignorant enough to think it was OK, and on the night of the esports event, I used the word similarly to how I'd heard it. As I write this, I realize how ridiculous, horrible and insensitive it all sounds.

And what makes it even worse is that I truly do know better.

I'm half Japanese. My parents are an interracial couple who have gotten disapproving stares and been made to feel uncomfortable just for being together. And all of a sudden, they were being asked why their 27-year-old Asian-American son said something racist. My maternal grandparents were held in an internment camp during World War II. There's absolutely no excuse for my ignorance.

My mom and dad's disappointment really affected me. Trust me when I say that they did not raise my sister and I this way. But even though I let them down in a particularly hurtful manner, they still supported me when I most needed them. I was, and will always be, grateful for how they've helped me navigate the last five months of my life.

But as much as my parents have always believed in me, there's no one who holds me to a higher standard than I do. And I had failed. I wanted to hide. I shut down my social media accounts. In the time of COVID-19, wearing a mask in public actually made me feel more comfortable. It wasn't healthy at all. I needed to take back control.

Since April, I've done a lot of reflecting. I realized how little I really knew about the African-American experience in this country and racism in general. Educating myself is something I should've done a long time ago, because it would've made me a better person – the kind of person who doesn't casually throw around an awful, racist word. The kind who makes an effort to understand the hate and oppression it symbolizes and the depth of pain it has caused Black people throughout history and still to this day. It was past time for me to shut up, listen and learn.

The first lesson: The N-word is not mine to use. It cannot be part of my vocabulary. The history of the word is connected to slavery, injustice and trauma that is deep and has gone on for far too long. I truly didn't say the word with the intention of degrading or demeaning another person, but my ignorance ended up insulting an entire community of people who, in the year 2020, still have to fight for justice and equality. When I look back at these last few months and see all the protests and unrest in our country, and the pain Black people are going through, it hurts to know that what I said contributed to that pain.

NASCAR has a zero-tolerance policy on this type of behavior. When they suspended me, I received a plan that started with mandatory sensitivity training and went from there. I'm in regular contact with them, and I've learned and grown as I've gone through the program. I hope to race in NASCAR again.

But I also needed to do some work on my own, so I hired a diversity coach, Doug Harris of The Kaleidoscope Group. There's no B.S. with Doug. He gives it to you straight, even if it's uncomfortable. He is a Black man with seven kids, and the conversations he has to have with them about things like driving around town and interacting with police when they're pulled over – not if they're pulled over, but when – gave me a level of awareness I hadn't had before, but it also made me realize the kind of privilege I've taken for granted. I mean, my livelihood is literally driving. Everyone should have someone in their life who will talk to them like Doug talks to me.

In early May, I traveled to Minnesota and volunteered in a food drive organized by Tony Sanneh, a retired pro soccer player who has his own charitable foundation. After the death of George Floyd, I went back to Minneapolis and joined Tony and his leadership team at the memorial that had been set up. We went around to areas of the community that had been affected. I asked them why people would destroy their own neighborhoods. Their response was eye-opening: "When people haven't been accepted by their community, they don't have any attachment to it."

I spoke with Olympic legend Jackie Joyner-Kersee and toured her community center in St. Louis. I've had conversations with Black athletes like Harold Varner III, racecar drivers like Bubba Wallace, J.R. Todd and Willy T. Ribbs, and corporate executives like Kevin Liles (formerly of Def Jam) and Perry Stuckey (of Eastman). We didn't just talk about the Black experience – we discussed the importance of having empathy and considering the struggles of people who don't look like me.

In all these experiences and conversations, there's been a common and unexpected response. Everyone I've talked to was fully aware of the mistake I made and they still chose to invest their time and energy into my growth as a person. Don't get me wrong, these have not been easy conversations. One of the toughest I had was with Mike Metcalf, an African-American crew member who was on my NASCAR team for many years. I've worked with Mike since I started in NASCAR, and disappointing him was the same as letting down family.

I've received a lot of straight talk from Mike and others since April. But what gives me hope and humbles me is how so many people have opened their doors to lift up someone who probably doesn't deserve it and to share perspectives I should've sought on my own a long time ago.

After I said the N-word, anger came at me from all angles. Being labeled a racist has hurt the most, but I brought that on myself. What I didn't expect, though, were all the people who, despite their disappointment in what I did, made the choice to not give up on me. It motivates me to repay their faith by working harder, not giving up on myself, and making sure something positive comes from the harm I caused.

For far too long, I was a part of a problem that's much larger than me. I fully admit that losing my job and being publicly humiliated was how I came to understand this. But in the aftermath, I realized that my young kids will one day be old enough to learn about what their daddy said. I can't go back and change it, but I can control what happens from here on out.

I want them to know that words do matter. Apologizing for your mistakes matters. Accountability matters. Forgiveness matters. Treating others with respect matters. I will not stop listening and learning, but for me now, it's about action – doing the right things, being a part of the solution and writing a new chapter that my children will be proud to read.

People have taught me a lot over the last five months. The next time I'm in a classroom, I hope I can repay their kindness by sharing my story so others can learn from my mistakes. Making it a story I'm proud to tell is completely up to me.

During a RISE Critical Conversation earlier this year, Florida State football player Jaiden Lars-Woodbey, Chicago police officer Luis Crespo and Detroit police officer Michael Richardson provide an example of empathic dialogue as they discuss walking in each other's shoes and understanding one another's perspectives.

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Empathy and Knowledge

Original Writing – Editorial 1st Place

By Jasmine Cupp – Schaffner Publications

A friend posted a quote online that has been resonating with me ever since I read it: “Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self-kind of understanding.” Bill Bullard

This, to me, is very reflective of the back and forth banter that sometimes happens in our community Facebook pages.

I did a story on a presentation that a citizen did at a council committee meeting and the person didn’t like the photo that I took of them at this meeting. They called me on the phone and asked me to please take the photo down, they had thought about it ever since seeing it and wanted it removed. I didn’t take it down because I had to, I took it down because I wanted to.

I thought to myself, if that were me and I felt that way I would want that person to take it down.

We, as a society, are lacking empathy.

Reading comments on social media can, at times, make your skin crawl. The anonymity of the keyboard/screen relationship gives a person some sort of electric form of liquid courage that enables them to say things with no filter, half a thought and no regard for the person on the receiving end of the message.

My message to our reader’s approaching 2016 would be to:

Seek knowledge, facts, truth Know the whole story before making judgments. Even before that; is this even a matter that you should have an opinion on?

Listen to facts Considering the source of information could be key in diagnosing misinformation in many instances, for many topics. Is what your friend telling you a fact or is it their opinion?

Have empathy Everyone is someone’s father, mother, sister, brother, child or friend. Being kind to one another and working together will get us so much further as a people than division and name calling.

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The highest form of knowledge is empathy

“The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world”- Plato. This quote in my opinion really is what empathy is all about in a few words.  I believe it really explains Possessor and the episode, “I Second That Emotion” in Futurama.

In an ultra- violent sci-fi- horror freak- out, Possessor has different scenes where empathy plays a huge role. The main character Tasya Vos is an agent whose job is to learn about one person at a time, enough to be able to mimic that person when she is in control of their body. This time Colin is her next victim. Tasya’s one task is to kill John who is the owner of a big company and Ava who is his daughter. By using Colin’s body (Ava’s fiancé), Tasya’s mission is possible. Tasya has shown throughout the movie that she has a conscious, unlike the people she works for. Her conscious can be seen as embodied empathy because many times during the movie, she has a hard time about killing the person’s body she was in. She starts feeling their emotions and she has internal battle of killing them off. Having her small family can be seen as dangerous in her line of work because she cannot have empathy when in someone’s body. Tasya goes through exercises in the beginning and end of the movie to check her consciousness is back in her own mind and there are no gaps in memories. One example was a framed butterfly, in the beginning of the movie she states, “I killed and mounted it one summer when I was a girl, and then I felt guilty about it. I still feel guilty about it”.  This is an example of who she is and the empathy she has. In the end, after killing her family, when Tasya returns to her own body, she picks up the same butterfly. She says, “I killed and mounted it one summer when I was a little girl”. This now shows a different Tasya and that she no longer feels empathy or guilt for her kills, be it the butterfly, her ex-husband, or her own child. Vos no longer feels any emotions of her own because of how many times she had to train to be someone else in another person’s body.

After watching possessor, Futurama was a breath of fresh air (literally). The entire episode had perfect examples how Bender the robot does not feel empathy. It also seems like Bender does not mind NOT feeling this emotion. Of course, the professor puts an empathy chip, as if it was so easy to give someone the feeling of empathy. After feeling all Leela emotions, he fights it every time. He does not want to feel this way, maybe because he feels weak. Of course, when Leela feels something now he feels it as well. What I thought was interesting is how he knows that is Leela’s feelings and not his own. So, the chip gave him the feeling, but it wasn’t true empathy it was Leela’s feelings. Showing that what we learned in this week’s lesson of theory of mind. The professor even states at the end of the episode that the chip was turned off, viewers believe that bender can feel empathy without the chip. Quickly after the professor states that the chip was working in triple capacity. Which than we see the normal Bender that did not change because of this adventure. Bender really had no empathy for Leela’s feelings when she lost Nibbler. At the end, when Leela is crying and tied up and needs Bender to save her, Bender can’t because of Leela’s emotions. How ironic, that now he feels so much of Leela’s feelings and can’t help her. This is a true example of Embodied Cognition, how the body influences the mind. Bender can’t save her until she figured out how to not feel her sad emotions, she needed to be selfish and only care about her own emotions.

Not everyone can feel empathy, it takes a human form to have the capability of feeling ones feeling. But the feeling empathy does not make you weak- like I stated above, it is the highest form of knowledge.

3 thoughts on “ The highest form of knowledge is empathy ”

Hey Glynis, I really like the quote you used in the beginning of this post, it speaks volumes and really connects well to the theme of both the movie and show we watched this week. I really like how you connected the butterfly and Vos’s family to show how throughout the film, Vos, lost all empathy. I think this is because in order to survive she had to become numb to everything otherwise she would fall apart. I really like your comment on how although Bender was sharing the emotions of Leela he couldn’t make it better only she could. This is so true in real life. People may console us and sympathize with us but at the end of the day we create our realities and it comes down to ourselves to get and feel better.

chowland July 21, 2022 Reply

I love the quote from Plato that you use to start your blog. Although, as we learned last week, Plato discussed the mind and body (and emotions) as separate entities (often at war with each other), it is interesting to think about the embodied nature of this quote. This is in part because, as we will learn in the next module, the conceptual metaphors that we use to make sense of the world are often embodied. But it also raises the question of what does it mean to see the eyes of another?

In Possessor, we get a literal version of this, where Vos is actually in the body of another, seeing the world through their eyes. You make a great point about how during the film, she seems to develop empathy for her victims, often finding herself unable to kill them. Great analysis of the significance of the butterfly at the end of the film. One really cool detail in the film is that as the camera zooms out from the son’s and Colin’s dead bodies, the blood pooling between them forms a shape very evocative of the butterfly. Why do you think Kroonenberg included this detail? How does it connect to Vos’s empathy (or, rather, the loss of it)?

In your discussion of Futurama, you make a really important point about how having empathy requires us to recognize that our feelings are not our own—even as we are “living through” the feelings of others. Your final point about needing a human (rather than a mechanical) body to feel empathy also relates to what we learned about embodied cognition. We use our bodies to access and understand the feelings of others. If we don’t have a body, then we can’t do that.

Jessica Hautsch July 21, 2022 Reply

Hi Glynis! I really enjoyed reading your response because it was super similar to mine! Even though Vos literally killed people when she was in control of someone’s body, she still felt empathy and this is shown when she has a hard time killing the non-volunteered killer. You pointed this out and it’s something that I didn’t really put together. It was interesting how being in Colin’s body was the body that made her lose all her empathy towards others.

I also watched Futurama after Possessor and it was definitely a relief. The gory film didn’t make me sick, it was just very disturbing. In Futurama I found it very funny when Nibbler was flushed down the toilet. I needed to laugh after watching Possessor and Futurama absolutely did that.

I liked how you mentioned that empathy is a human personality trait and this is why Bender couldn’t feel emotions. He’s a robot so I wonder if since he knows what feelings of sadness, happiness, etc. feel like, he’ll keep feeling them as time goes on.

alnunez July 21, 2022 Reply

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50 Plato Empathy Quotes

The famous ancient philosopher- Plato was of Greek origin belonging to the Classical period in Athens. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy which is known to be the first institution of higher education in the West. He is indisputably a figure of distinguished importance and influence in the world of philosophy and all philosophical discourses. The most rudimentary distinction in Platonic philosophy is between those observable objects that appear to be beautiful such as good, just, unified and the one object that beauty truly is such as goodness, justice, unity, from which those many beautiful things receive their names and characteristics. He was very conscious about how philosophy should be conceived.

Table of Contents

QUOTES OF PLATO

• “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
• “A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.”
• “Thinking – the talking of the soul with itself.”
• “There is no harm in repeating a good thing.”
• “Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.”
• “Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom.”
• “The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.”
• “Wealth, and poverty; one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.”
• “An empty vessel makes the loudest sound, so they that have the least wit are the greatest babblers.”
• “Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.”
• “If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.”
• “Books give a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything.”
• “The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
• “Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.”
• “And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.”
• “Character is simply, habit long continued.”
• “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
• “Books are immortal sons defying their sires.”
• “He was a wise man who invented God.”
• “How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?”
• “Every heart sings a song, incomplete until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
• “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
• “Human behaviour flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.”
• “good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws”
• “No wealth can ever make a bad man at peace with himself.”
• “Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”
• “The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.”
• “If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”
• “There is truth in wine and children.”
• “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.”
• “Excellence is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice. We do not act ‘rightly’ because we are ‘excellent’, in fact, we achieve ‘excellence’ by acting ‘rightly.’”
• “Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.”
• “Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”
• “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”
• “There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.”
• “To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.”
• “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
• “The madness of love is the greatest of heaven’s blessings.”
• “Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”
• “He who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age. But to him who is of an opposite disposition, youth and age are equally a burden.”
• “Musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.”
• “The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.”
• “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
• “Nothing beautiful without struggle.”
• “Have you ever sensed that our soul is immortal and never dies?”
• “…if a man can be properly said to love something, it must be clear that he feels affection for it as a whole, and does not love part of it to the exclusion of the rest.”
• “Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another.”
• “No wealth can ever make a bad man at peace with himself”
• “The society we have described can never grow into a reality or see the light of day, and there will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed, my dear Glaucon, of humanity itself, till philosophers become rulers in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.”

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Damayanti Dubey is a final year English major at Loreto College, Kolkata. She is a writer by passion and loves to indulge in languages, especially English, Bengali, and Urdu. She aims at exploring all of their intricacies and nuances. Damayanti is a disciple of Padma Bhushan Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty and is a national scholar of Indian classical music. She has always believed that a sound mind, free from the clutches of regressive and negative thoughts is the key to living a healthy life and makes efforts to promote mental wellness through the power of her words.

Damayanti believes in thinking beyond boundaries.

Empathy: The Highest Form of Knowledge

“The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.” -Plato

Emergency telecommunicators handle calls for service ranging from barking dogs and noise complaints to assaults, structure fires, and medical emergencies. It is a virtuous superpower to consistently show compassion and empathy for the concerns and emergencies of those seeking assistance, regardless of the perceived urgency of the matter.

When telecommunicators are asked during their pre-employment interviews why they are interested in doing this job, the most common answer seems to be “to help people.” Happy National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week, especially to those who still give that answer every single year of their career. Don’t ever forget why you started this journey.

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