Philosophy question: Can someone please assist with summarizing this passage fro
ID: 3462496 • Letter: P
Question
Philosophy question: Can someone please assist with summarizing this passage from Platos Georgias? supporting reasons and the main conclusion of the argument.
ALso how this passage relates to the terms knowledge (episteme) and belief (doxa).
Socrates: You do recognize that there are situations when we say, “I’ve been taught,” don’t you?
Gorgias: Yes.
Socrates: Now, do you think the state of having been taught something is the same as the state of having been convinced? Is learning the same as conviction, or different?
Gorgias: In my opinion, Socrates, they’re different.
Socrates: Yes, you’re right, and here’s the proof of it. If you were asked, “Gorgias, can conviction be either true or false, you’d answer yes, I’m sure.
Gorgias: Yes.
Socrates: But can knowledge be either true or false?
Gorgias: Certainly not.
Socrates: Obviously, then, conviction and knowledge aren’t the same?
Gorgias: Right ….
Explanation / Answer
Summary:
A Belief might be either true or false, but knowledge by its definition must be true, or else it is not considered knowledge. Rather plato simply states that it is a fundamental aspect of knowing, beyond any argument. Relatedly, one type of persuasion can produce belief without any knowledge (false belief), while another type produces knowledge (true belief).
According to Gorgias, rhetoric's boundaries lies majorly in the courtroom. Gorgias agrees that the kind of conviction about the right and the wrong which is created in the courtroom (legal) or at any other gatherings (social) "is kind of persuasive but not all instructive about right or wrong."
Treating knowledge and belief as defining powers of the mind, which operate differently and independently from one another did not take root in philosophy
after Plato.
Plato did not actually explore the implications and analysis of knowledge’s ontological and functional independence or difference from the belief in his Republic V account. Nor has any epistemology concluded the explanations that could be afforded by the status of
knowledge as an independent mental capacity from belief.
Plato experiments here, on what happens if a belief is a different power than knowledge, with the different objects and different operation from knowledge.
Belief in the given context is something like a multiply fractured mirror, which reflects inadequately in a divided way what reality is actually like, for example: when seeing with this fractured mirror, instead of seeing the study desk with books on it, we can see a few bits of brown, blue and white and other surfaces.
But, Knowledge has a differing key to reality than to what belief does, such that what is accessed by the knowledge is very different from what a belief can access. This may seem quiet contrary to common sense, but the whole idea behind it is not what one digs and finds depends of their way of excavation method.
The knowledge content of any scientist’s knowledge is that, friction produces heat, is very different from the belief content of an uneducated person that friction produces heat.
Plato’s famous power-analysis of knowledge is a very first attempt to explain this difference between the knowledge and the belief.
He tells that, Knowledge tends to reach the roots of the phenomena/events all around us, and these roots in their turn play a crucial role in the structuring, re-individuation and the re-identification of the phenomena or events.
In the present context, Plato says that knowledge and belief operate kind of differently, the first infallibly and second fallibly.
This has been taken to understand that the knowledge is always true while the belief is sometimes true and sometimes false. But actually, this is not what Plato explains to us in this argument. On the reading here, all the knowledge is true, while every kind of belief is both true and false.
This can be in the sense in which the belief is quiet fallible. This very aspect of Plato’s theory stays latent in philosophy because we tend to have adopted the ‘justified true belief’ conception of knowledge. This is from which it immediately followed that the true belief is the common
denominator or result between the division of knowledge and belief.
On such an explanation, the knowledge and true belief share the same content, which needs only some beliefs to be true, not true and false. This became axiomatic in our conceptualization of belief. Plato’s conceptualization of the belief in Republic V is antithetical to it. He tells that belief falls quiet short of capturing the content of knowledge. And in the content it captures,
it always falls short of capturing the real truth. Hence, belief is fallible in that, every belief captures only impure/adultrated truths.
Episteme, is derived Ancient Greek word, which means, ‘knowledge or science’. According to Plato‘s terminology, episteme means knowledge, as it is in “justified true belief“.
which is in contrast to doxa, which means a ‘common belief or opinion’. The fact of the consideration is that the people don’t walk into walls, because they tend to ‘believe’ that the walls are solid. Hence, belief informs to take action.
People tend to act on what they believe. A Justified, True, Belief is a rhetorical tautology of peer review or understanding, that which can be agreed to exist or to be true. For people to disagree with the most scientific definition of knowledge is foolish. This is a common logical fallacy that people have. They think that they can falsify somebody from their own perspective without actually understanding what they are saying.
Plato related doxa as for being a belief. which is unrelated to reason. This unreasoning tendency and also that doxa, resided within the lower-parts of the soul.
The concept of doxasta in Plato’s Theory of Forms, states that physical objects are manifestations of the doxa and are hence not in their original true form.
Plato’s frame of doxa as the opponent or opposite of knowledge led to the classical opposition of error to truth. It has become a huge concern in Western philosophy.
Plato has Socrates suggest that knowledge is orthos doxa for which a human can provide a logos, thus starting the traditional definition of knowledge as “justified true belief“. Hence, error is considered as pure negativity. And tgis error can take various forms. One amongst them is the form of illusion. Given as such, the doxa may ironically be defined as the ‘philosopher‘s grieve mistake’, it is contrasted with episteme.Aristotle believed that doxa’s value was in practicality and common usage. But in contrast with Plato’s philosophical purity relating the doxa to deception.
Conclusion
Plato differentiates between knowledge and belief as two different powers that operate in different ways on their objects. He actually does not tend to develop the theory enough to show how exactly each of the power operates. Hence, he does not explain how their operation makes
the one infallible (knowledge) and the other fallible(belief) .
What is important about the explanation of knowledge and belief in Republic V is the intuitions about these concepts that Plato reveals in it. The first intution is that knowledge and belief are powers. This view is very different from the craft analogy of the prior philosophies for moral knowledge.
The second intuition is that they are two different powers, And the one can operate independently & individually of the other. Hence neither is explainable through the other.
The third intuition is that the knowledge and belief have quiet different objects, just as sight and hearing do.
This is the most odd element of the theory to our own conceptualization of the objects of knowledge and belief. A person can begin to find it acceptable only if he tends to think of the object of knowledge as being Individuated or independent by the process through which knowledge reaches it.
Plato puts forth this, not to suggest that knowledge creates the world, but rather that different mining methods can extract different materials. Even if the variance is in the degree of purity. Finally, the concept that knowledge can affect the belief, by placing the objects of belief in a different ontological perspective or view.