PLATO ON LANGUAGE AND DOXA

Samuel Scolnicov
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The relation between words and objects is apparently a simple one.

Words refer to objects, whatever this ‘referring’ may be thought to be. In
fact, this relation may be so simple as to defy analysis. Attempts to dissolve
it into other, logically prior relations have, on the whole, proved unsuc-
cessful. This relation can perhaps be clarified, rather than analysed, by
other metaphors: Words are ‘about’ things, ‘point’ to things, and the like.
But, metaphors apart, the relation remains obscure. And yet, to the naïve
speaker of any language, it seems perfectly natural. In fact, every speaker
assumes it as a matter of course.
With common opinion, let us then provisionally assume a simple,
direct referential link between word and object. The question whether
words represent their supposed respective objects by nature or by con-
vention is immaterial, as Plato shows in Cratylus. What is required is not
that each single word be a mimesis of the object it refers to, but that the
structure of language represent the structure of reality, in some way or
another.1 An ideal language would imitate, or represent natural divisions.
It is not at all clear that natural languages do it: Dogs and wolves are the
same animal and sea cucumbers are not vegetables.
If natural language did, at least as a first approximation, represent the
structure of the ideas, it could serve us as a starting point for the investi-
gation of reality. So maintained Aristotle and such was (and still is) the
main assumption of some modern philosophers of language. If natural lan-
guage is only a first approximation, perhaps what we need is a ‘purified’
or ‘regularized’ language. Such were the attempts of Frege and of
Wittgenstein, in developing propositional calculus. The propositional cal-

____________________
1 Cf. Bernard Williams, ‘Cratylus’ theory of names and its refutation’, in S. Everson,

ed., Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); contra David Sedley,
Plato’s Cratylus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

ORDIA PRIMA 4 (2005) 75-87

76 Samuel Scolnicov

culus of the Logical-philosophical tractate is an ideal language, supposed

faithfully to represent the structure of reality. The relation between propo-
sitions and facts (in this case, not objects) is direct and primitive, i.e. irre-
ducible.2 Already Aristotle had proposed his almost formal logic of sub-
jects and predicates as an expression of his ontology of genera and differ-
entiae.3 In the Sophistici elenchi, he sets himself the task of analysing falla-
cies as resulting from language itself 4 and correcting them in an attempt
to ‘regularize’ language5 and make it reflect reality directly, with no medi-
ation. We shall return later to this move, which is much more important
than it seems at first sight.
In the Philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein abandoned the ‘isomor-
phistic’ conception of language, but still lay down, now openly, basic com-
municativeness as a prior condition of all language, independently of any
ontology. The significativity of language, for Wittgenstein in the
Investigations, depended on its communicativeness. (Not the other way
round, as, e.g., for Aristotle and for the author of the Tractate.) A private
language is not only non-communicative, it also lacks signification, since
signification was, for the late Wittgenstein, necessarily public. Meaning is
use, and use there can be only within a community of language.
This is what Gorgias denied in his fr. 3 DK: On what is not, or On nature.
This work may have been a parody of Eleatic arguments. But, as all good
parody, it has a serious point. Sounds (or written symbols) cannot convey
concepts and perceptions, and concepts and perceptions lack in them-
selves any criterion of correspondence to reality. A supposed perception
or memory of a chariot running on the sea can be as vivid (later thinkers
will say clara et distincta) as any other. We all see apparitions, remember
things that never happen and imagine ourselves in places where we shall
never be. Moreover, there is no reason why a sound that I associate with
a concept or a percept of mine should arouse in others the same concept
____________________
2 Tractate 4.25.
3 See, e.g., Analytica Posteriora I 6. 74b5-35, on the necessary middle term as the con-
dition of a demonstrative syllogism.
4 See, e.g., Sophistici elenchi 7. 169a22 ff., 8. 170a12 ff., and esp. 10. 170b11 ff. On

homonymy as ‘the essential vice’ of language, see Pierre Aubenque, Le problème de l’être
chez Aristote (Paris, Presse Universitaire de France, 1962), pp. 106-123, esp. p. 119; and
Michel Narcy, Le philosophe et son double: Un commentaire de l’Euthydème de Platon (Paris,
J. Vrin, 1984), App. I.
5 Cf. Sophistici elenchi 17. 175a36: diorthoun.
 Plato on Language and Doxa 77

or percept. The significativity of language is thus totally denied. Gorgias

in his On Nature had dismissed the significativity of language based only
on the failure of reference. Parmenides had gone further than that. A gen-
eration earlier, he had already denied the significativity of language, and
pointedly because of its inadequate structure, in fact because of its having
a structure at all. Language, like sensation, necessarily implies differentia-
tion, and all differentiation is absent from reality.6 The very fact of lan-
guage having a structure disqualifies it as a tool for expressing the absolute
unity of rational being. Language, together with sensation, is responsible
for doxa, ‘in which there is no truthful persuasion’.7 The structures of lan-
guage and of sensation are purely nominalistic. Language and doxa are
completely severed from reality.
The basic question of the philosophy of language, after Parmenides,
came to be, then: How can language signify, or communicate, if at all it
can?
In the Republic, Plato seems for the moment to ignore Parmenides’
problem. He starts, as usual, from the unreflective, common-sensical posi-
tion. In that notorious passage in the Republic, he says: ‘We are accus-
tomed (eiothamen) to assume (tithesthai) somehow (pou) a single eidos for
each of the many things to which we assign the same name’.8 But even in
the Republic, this is only an opening gambit. ‘Assume’ is Plato’s technical
term for positing a proposition provisionally held.9 As a normal dialectical
procedure, Plato starts from accepted premises, which may be, and often
are, changed if and when necessary. Especially when thus introduced,
such propositions are not to be taken as Plato’s final word on the matter
at hand.
Following the method he learned from Socrates, Plato takes up as his
starting point common usage or the position of Socrates’ interlocutor
(which often represents common usage). When an aporia is reached, Plato
tries further, as explained at Phaedo 100a, to overcome it. But he does not
aim at building a system (although something like a system may be pre-
supposed by at least some of his hypotheses), but only to secure euporia,

____________________
6 Parmenides, fr. 8.22.
7 Parmenides, fr. 1.30.
8 Republic 596a.
9 Richard Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed.,

1953), pp. 93-94.

78 Samuel Scolnicov

‘free passage’, to disarm the particular aporia he is confronted with at each

juncture. Thus, he does not assume at each stage of the argument more
than he strictly needs for the task at hand. (And this goes even for pas-
sages like the makrotera hodos of Republic vi-vii.) In any case, all hypothe-
ses are put forward provisionally until the arkhe anypothetos is reached, if
indeed it ever is.
In that passage of the Republic, Plato is not interested in language but
in a sketchy version of his doctrine of ideas. For this end, the initial, com-
mon-sense assumption suffices: one word, one object. But, as he makes
abundantly clear in Euthydemus, words in a natural – or, rather, in an
empirical – language do not signify directly.10 They would, if they could
reflect the structure of reality, irrespective of whether they singly signify
physei or nomo(i). If language always imitated the structure of reality, there
would be no error. Error is a wrong connexion of concepts or of ideas, in
the soul and expressed in words. But such wrong connexions cannot be
in the object of knowledge, for the object is what it is and not otherwise.
These wrong connexions must be made by us.
Thus, in the Euthydemus, Plato makes quite clear that common, empir-
ical language carries in itself no meaning. The meaning of language always
depends on how one uses words. In the Euthydemus, Plato forcefully makes
the point that meaning is in the souls, not in words.11 Language is a tool,
and a tool is used by someone to do something. In the Cratylus, for exam-
ple, it is used by the name-giver to make distinctions within reality.12 It is
worth notice that there the discursive faculty that gives names is dianoia
(Cratylus 416c). Dianoia, in the Cratylus as in the Republic, is the form of
thought that attempts at discriminating (krinein). Discriminating by names
depends on he who does it, the name-giver (and so far Plato agrees with
Parmenides13), man or god, not on the words themselves. Of course, the
name-giver, as it were a single person, is a useful fiction. If the language is
not an ideal one, the name-giver can be just as well the linguistic commu-
nity. As a handy extrapolation, the ideal language is presented as estab-
lished by the god, who does not make mistakes, as opposed to men,

____________________
10 Euthydemus 277e5.
11 Euthydemus 295b.
12 Cratylus 388b.
13 Cf. Euthydemus 295b with Parmenides, fr. 8.38-9: ‘These are all a name / that mor-

tals gave, persuaded of its truth.’

 Plato on Language and Doxa 79

who often go astray.14 In both cases, meaning depends on the giver of the
name or on its user, not on the linguistic expression itself.
Now, Plato’s Socrates has a problem. He is convinced (or at least so
Plato presents him) that reality has a stable structure and language should
mirror that structure. But Plato was painfully aware – no doubt in the wake
of Socrates’ failures with his interlocutors – that all language is subject to
misunderstandings. In fact, there can be no guarantee of a shared mean-
ing between two interlocutors. What Wittgenstein was to assume in the
Tractate – that all language is basically communicative – is what Plato
denied in the Euthydemus. For Plato, the basic situation is misunderstand-
ing. ‘And what if you mean one thing in asking me’, retorts Socrates to
Euthydemus, ‘and I understand otherwise?’15 This is another reason why
Socrates cannot teach in the common sense of imparting information. As
Gorgias had taught in his On what is not, no information can ever be con-
veyed, certainly not by language. But, as he himself showed us, even if lan-
guage cannot signify, it can be used to do things, to persuade, and first and
foremost to lead, to make things happen through others. As Socrates points
out in the Gorgias (453a-454a), rhetoric aims at persuading the hearers, not
at teaching them. It aims at moving the audience, not changing them.
Plato’s Socrates notoriously took a leaf out of Gorgias’ book and uses
words in uncommon ways. In speaking ironically, he does not use words
in their accepted sense, or not only in that sense. Irony is a rhetorical tool,
and as such it hinges on the way words are used at each time rather than
on their supposedly simple, stable signification. The real signification of
words, if any such there is, is not important in itself but only as a foil to
what the speaker wants to achieve. What is important is the action per-
formed with them. In speaking ironically, Socrates does not use words pri-
marily to signify – in other words, he does not mean what he says, not in
a simple way – but to achieve a desired result. In Socrates’ ironical use of
his words, they do not necessarily describe reality. More often than not,
he will use words in the way his interlocutor uses them, or in such a way
as to be understood by his interlocutor as if he and Socrates shared
between them a common meaning, only the better to commit him (at this
stage of the elenchos) to his untenable understanding of his own words.

____________________
14 Cratylus 425 c-d.
15 Euthydemus 296c.
80 Samuel Scolnicov

Rather than teach them, Socrates uses words to push his interlocutors
to confront the contradictions in their souls. For this purpose, he does not
need to share with them meanings. At least in the aporetic dialogues, it
suffices for him to follow the use of his interlocutor and undermine it from
within (or, rather, to show that the meaning they ascribe to their words is
inconsistent with their other opinions), in an almost formal way.
Yet, even in order to persuade or to dissuade, words have to signify,
even if not adequately. There must be a minimum of significativity for com-
munication, even limited communication, to be possible. Irony depends on
such a limited understanding of words, on a double signification.
But how can signification be understood only partially? For if the word
‘bee’ means a bee, then either I take it to signify a bee and then I under-
stand it perfectly, or I take it to signify something else – say, a wasp – and
then I misunderstand it. Learning skills may be a matter of degrees: you
may learn how to play tennis better or worse. But knowledge of concepts,
so it is said, is not: you either have the concept or you do not.
However, even when wrongly used, words do signify something. It
cannot be the case, as Dionysodorus would have it, that it is impossible to
speak falsely and he who allegedly speaks falsely utters empty sounds.16
Error is not zero signification. A false sentence does have meaning, even
if that meaning is not true. Such a sentence expresses a doxa, although one
that does not correspond to reality. Error is false doxa. Now we have two
problems in hand: How can a phrase signify but not truly and how can it
signify truly but fall short of expressing episteme?
Let us leave error aside for the while and look for the moment into the
problematic concept of true doxa. The lover of sights and sounds of
Republic v would rightly be angered at us if we took his true doxa for
straight error.17 Taking the many beautiful things for the one beautiful itself
may not be accurate, but it is certainly not like saying that the beautiful is
ugly. Similarly, when Hippias, in the dialogue named after him, says that
the beautiful is a beautiful maid,18 he is not totally mistaken, although he
is not completely right either. In both cases the words are partially ade-
quate. Their words are applied to the respective objects with only some
justification; they suit their objects truly but not precisely, only in some way

____________________
16 Euthydemus 285d ff.
17 Republic 476d.
18 Hippias maior 287e.
 Plato on Language and Doxa 81

or to some extent. And they can suit them partially because they can be
applied, not completely mistakenly but not totally truly, to objects that are
what they are only partially. This is the solution offered at the end of
Republic v.19 But how can an object be what it is only partially? Either it is
or it is not.20
Hence the counter-intuitive, restricted Principle of Non-contradiction
of Republic iv. The same thing will not consent to be and not to be the
same thing, at least not simultaneously and in the same respect, that is21:
in relation to the same thing. Strangely enough, Plato calls this Principle
an hypothesis.22 For Plato, as for Parmenides, the unrestricted, ‘strong’
Principle of Non-contradiction is incontrovertible: ‘For this shall never be
forced: that what are not should be (einai me eonta).’23 But that the
Principle of Non-contradiction can be restricted, i.e. that some things can
have and not have the same predicate, albeit in some specified ways (not
in the same respect and not at the same time), and yet be still the same
thing – this is certainly not self-evident. That there are objects that can
bear restricted contradictions, that can be F and not-F, although with
reservations, this has to be taken for given, for a fact, and an unintelligible
fact at that. Such a Principle must therefore be accepted as the best
hypothesis capable of saving the partial intelligibility of our world, without
any further justification other than its transcendental function of securing
our desired consequence. Thus, Plato has two Principles of Non-contra-
diction: one strong, unrestricted, for intelligible entities, and another,
hypothetically restricted, for sensible, only partially intelligible entities.24
In the Parmenides, Plato will be more precise and will distinguish the
kath’ auto, in itself, mode of being of the idea, which does not allow of con-
tradictions of any sort, and its pros ti, relational, mode of being, in which
ideas are and are not in different relations. This fascinating question of the
two modes of being of Platonic ideas does not concern us now. I have dealt
____________________
19 Republic 479c.
20 There is here no question of existence. What is in question is their being or not
being so and so. And cf. n. 34, below.
21 Epexegetical kai.
22 Republic 437a6. In Metaphysics G 3, Aristotle, no doubt in open opposition to Plato,

repeatedly retorts that this Principle is not hypothetical.

23 Parmenides, fr 7.1.
24 For Aristotle’s one-level ontology, the second, restricted Principle is of course

enough.
82 Samuel Scolnicov

with it at length elsewhere.25 For our present purposes it should suffice to

follow Plato, assuming strictly the necessary minimum at this stage, and
distinguish only between ideal and non-ideal entities, provisionally con-
sidering ideas as not subject to contradictions of any sort.
If, then, we disregard the relational mode of being of the ideas, we are
left with two types of entities, non-ideal, that bear restricted contradictions:
sensible things (introduced as such in Phaedo) and souls, or rather incar-
nate souls, introduced as bearers of such contradictions in Republic iv.
(What is the relation between these two types of entities, sensible objects
and incarnate souls, this is unimportant to my point here.) It is worthy of
note that the restricted Principle of Non-contradiction – that some types of
entities can suffer contradictions as long as these are not in the same
respect and at the same time – was in fact introduced in Republic iv in
order to make place for the incarnate soul and its opposing forces.26 This
special status of the incarnate soul will be important presently.
But the sole hypothesis of the restricted Principle of Non-contradiction
and of sensible objects, which conform to that Principle, is not sufficient
to explain error and doxa. For if gnosis (a general term for cognition) is
apprehension of an object,27 there can only be two states: apprehension
and failure to apprehend. Thus, if one apprehends a sensible (or, for that
matter, an ideal) object one succeeds in apprehending it and every such
cognitive state of the soul will be episteme. It is true that sensible objects
change and in this respect their apprehension is not like the stable appre-
hension of ideas. But this does not yet explain Hippias on a beautiful maid
or the lovers of sights in Republic v, who take these sensible things for
ideas. Dionysodorus, in the Euthydemus, would then be right: Error would
be zero cognition, failure to grasp or to see. Speaking falsely, as a pre-
sumed expression of a false doxa, would be impossible.
Such a conception relies on a simple binary model of language and
cognition. In such a model, a word ‘a’ signifies the object a, or a concept
(noema) a relates directly to the respective object. In the binary model
there are only two possibilities: either ‘a’ refers (or relates) or does not

____________________
25 “The two faces of Platonic knowledge”, Plato: The Internet Journal of the

International Plato Society 4 (2004) www.nd.edu/~plato.

26 The restriction of the argument to incarnate souls effectively situates the locus of

(restricted) contradiction in the sensible world.

27 As in Republic 478a6.
 Plato on Language and Doxa 83

refer (or relate) to its presumed object. In this model there is no possibil-
ity of error.28 There is only success or failure in referring (or relating). A
fortiori, there is no possibility of true doxa either, as we shall see.
Error and doxa necessitate a triadic model of language and of cogni-
tion. This is why Plato introduces an additional factor. A ‘function’
(dynamis) of the soul, like episteme or doxa, is distinguished by its object
and by ‘what it achieves’ (ho apergazetai)29. In other words, it is not only
the object of the dynamis that defines it, but the mode in which the object
is apprehended is no less crucial. And this depends on the apprehending
subject. (Of course, there are objects that, due to their nature, cannot be
apprehended by episteme, as we saw just now.)
‘Knowledge (episteme)’, says Plato twice in quick succession, ‘is cogniz-
ing what is as it is’ (gnonai hos esti to on).30 In Meno, a variation of this model
is utilized without making it explicit. Drawing the figure in the sand,
Socrates asks Meno’s slave boy: ‘Do you recognize (gignoskeis) an area like
this, that it is a square?’31 Here three factors, not two, are involved: a know-
er S who knows something F as being F. He could not have recognized
F as F, and think of it as G. He could have thought that the square area
was a triangle. And if, as in Republic v, we accept objects f that both are
and are not F (in different respects and/or not at the same time), then who-
ever thinks of them as real, i.e. in all respects, F cannot be said to think or
say the truth but cannot be accused of being totally mistaken either. This
is the state of the doxazon, he who has only (true) doxa. For (true) doxa, as
Plato specifies in Republic v, is to take the similar not for what it is but for
that to which it is similar to, to take the copy for the original.32
Plato resorts to this triadic model only when he strictly needs it. And
in all occasions he does it in the context of a more precise distinction
between episteme and doxa.33 But note that both true and false doxa depend
on this model. False doxa, i.e. error, is misidentifying F as G, calling Paul
Peter. True doxa – but doxa nevertheless, still short of episteme – is thinking
____________________
28 The Theaetetus shows at length how, on the binary model assumed there, false

doxa, i.e. error, is impossible.

29 Republic 477d1.
30 Republic 477b, 478a6.
31 Meno 82b.
32 Republic 476c.
33 Cf. Meno 82b, Republic 437a, Sophist 263b. But, of course, not the converse.

Sometimes, as in Phaedo, a difference of objects is enough.

84 Samuel Scolnicov

Helen the beautiful itself, while she is only a restricted version of the
beautiful, i.e. she is beautiful only at certain times and in certain respects.
There is yet another possibility: seeing the restricted version of F as such,
as the restricted image it is, recognizing f as f. This state of the soul
remains unnamed by Plato, but he describes it as the state of the
philosopher who returns to the cavern and recognizes the shadows of
justice for what they are, mere shadows.
We accept, then, that there are objects that can only be this or that in
a restricted way.34 These are the sensible objects, which are different
under different aspects and at different times. Such are the objects of reg-
ular doxa and of the above-mentioned cognition of the philosopher who
returns to the cave. But in the Divided Line, in Republic vi, we come to
know that there is also doxa-like apprehension of ideas. Dianoia is charac-
terized, in the recapitulation of the Line, as the state of the soul of those
who attain something of being (tou ontos ti epilambanesthai), as dreaming
(hos oneirottousi) about it, without being able to justify their hypotheses.35
If episteme and doxa were distinguished only by their objects, there could
not be such doxa-like apprehension of ideas. Any apprehension of an idea
would be full episteme, since it does attain its object, the alternative being
zero cognition. And yet, we doubtless have incomplete and unreasoned
perception of non-sensible objects, as when we know Pythagoras’ theorem
without actually being able to prove it. But this is precisely the point: being
able to prove it is to know it as it is, i.e. in its full intelligibility. Knowing
only its verbal formulation, detached from the context of its proof, is not
knowing it as it is. This is not episteme; it is a true, but only doxa-like appre-
hension of the ideal object, nothing more. Doxa is cognition of the object
in a certain way,36 not as quite as it is. (This is not to say that dianoia is doxa.
A dynamis, as we saw, is distinguished by two characteristics: (i) about what
it is, and (ii) what it achieves. Dianoia is (i) akin to episteme in being about
ideas, but (ii) it is like doxa in being only a partially adequate, unjustified
apprehension of them.)
____________________
34 Not ‘that exist in a restricted way’. The concept of ‘restricted existence’ is rather

unintelligible and such an understanding of the Greek verb in its technical sense is mistak-
en. Cf. Kahn, Charles H. “The Greek Verb ‘to Be’ and the Concept of Being”. Foundations
of Language 2 (1966).
35 Republic 533b.
36 ‘Pou’, ‘somehow’, is Plato’s technical term. Cf. LSJ, s.v. II, and my Plato’s Parmenides

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), passim.

 Plato on Language and Doxa 85

The role of the soul – or rather, of the incarnate soul – in the expla-
nation of doxa is crucial.37 For Plato, as for all good rationalists, the default
condition is episteme. For us, post-Cartesians that we are, this may seem
strange, even perverse. But since Parmenides, and less explicitly even
before, episteme, or noesis, does not need explanation. Reality is, in princi-
ple, open to us. It is error (or doxa, as partial error) that must be explained.
Doxa is a reflection of reality in the soul, but only a partially adequate
reflection of it. The incarnate soul, subject as it is to restricted contradic-
tions, reflects the ideas not as they are but as they appear in the incarnate
medium. As the Phaedo stresses time and again, the body – much as it is
indispensable for the attainment of knowledge of the ideas – is, at the
same time, what hinders pure intellect. Philosophy is famously a rehears-
al for death,38 an attempt at disregarding the distortions imposed by the
incarnate state of the soul. In its true form, Plato tells us in Republic x, the
soul is free of these extraneous additions to its pure, non-bodily being.39
Whether this pure state of the soul is reached at some future time or is a
projection in time of a continuous, non-empirical dimension of the soul,
this does not concern us here directly.
After this makrotera hodos, we can now go back to the question of a nat-
ural language. Here too, in the triadic model – S calls a ‘a’ or ‘b’ – the
role of soul, as the subject of cognition, is pivotal. It is soul that gives
meaning to words. In an ideal language, it is god that gives names. But he
does no more than faithfully reproduce the structure of the ideas, and one
might as well consider him a didactic element, an extrapolation of the
human name-giver. (Plato sometimes uses such didactic extrapolations, as
in the description of the driver and horses representing the souls of the
gods in the Phaedrus.40) By contrast, a natural language depends totally on
the way we use words. Plato thus shifts the burden of signification from
language to the speaker. Because it is we that establish the actual meaning
of the words we use, we can go wrong in our divisions of reality, and we
often do.
This is the lesson of the Euthydemus and the Cratylus. Natural language,
like doxa, is inextricably contextual. It is always given within an empirical

____________________
37 Cf., e.g., Euthydemus 295b and Theaetetus 189e.
38 Cf. Phaedo 67e.
39 Republic 611c.
40 Phaedrus 246a.
86 Samuel Scolnicov

context, that cannot be disregarded. Not only any name can be given to
any object,41 but the structure of language does not necessarily represent
the structure of reality. However, it is not completely severed from it. If it
were, there could not even be true doxa.
Plato is not a conventionalist in matters of language, nor is he simply a
naturalist. In the nomos/physis controversy, he takes a peculiar position. In
an ideal language words would have fixed meanings; in a natural lan-
guage they do not. Plato shows us time and again that the sole analysis of
language will not take us, by itself, anywhere. Already in Protagoras, the
interpretative exercise on the poem of Simonides42 can be twisted in any
direction. With some ingenuity, any text can yield any meaning. In the
Cratylus, Plato is quite clearly able to wring any meaning out of any word.
Yet, natural language is all we have to go on. We can use it to change
behaviour. But this, for Plato’s Socrates, is not enough. He wants to
change the souls of his interlocutors. Their souls are the seats of cognition
and meaning. And, as he tells us in Crito, they are that which is ruined by
injustice and profits by justice.43 Socrates wants to change the way in
which they perceive reality and express it. He can do this only by using
language. Therefore, he has to manipulate language, abuse it, show its lim-
itations, throw his interlocutors in the elenctic dialogues into despair, in
order to make them confront reality as it is, to go beyond the limits of their
language and their world.
In his more constructive dialogues, like the Republic or the Phaedrus,
he still has to rely on language to construct an imitation of the ideal reali-
ty. Even in such dialectical dialogues as the Sophist and the Statesman,
where he tries to give us examples of adequate diairesis of ideas, he has
no other means than natural language. He starts from our common-sense
perception of reality as expressed in language and tries to find his way to
a more adequate perception. None the less, he moves always within the
realm of doxa, true or false. But we cannot tell whether our doxai are true
or false before we have attained the end of the road.

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41 Cratylus 414d. The protasis of the conditional in which this assertion is embedded

has just been affirmed in the immediately preceding lines. At 433e-434e, Socrates seems to
agree with Hermogenes on the mimetic nature of language; but see the sequel at 435a-d.
And cf. also Williams 1994.
42 Protagoras 338e-347a.
43 Crito 47c.
 Plato on Language and Doxa 87

This is where we need dialogue. In dialogue we attempt to check each

step by appeal to interpersonality. The logos is common, as Heraclitus
believed,44 and what seems right not only to me but also to you has a bet-
ter chance of being so. But, of course, this homologia is never a guarantee
of truth. And, indeed, even in the dialectical dialogues, as the Sophist and
the Statesman, and also in such dialogues as the Republic and the Phaedrus,
wrong roads are taken and our steps often have to be retraced. In all
those, the dialogical form is an attempt to bridge the gap between natural
language and ideal language, without ever a guarantee of success. If we
could succeed, we would not merely move souls one way or another but
we would be able to change them – which change we name ‘education’.

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44 Heraclitus, fr. 2.