Plato: Epistemology1

Nicholas White

Introduction

Plato’s epistemology is the direct ancestor of virtually all contemporary philosophical reflections on
knowledge. Most current accounts of knowledge owe something substantial to his views. At the same
time, however, his approach is not the same as most recent ones. For one thing, his thinking about
knowledge is far more closely linked with metaphysics than present-day epistemology is. For another
thing, he is less intensely concerned than recent epistemology has been with whether knowledge is
correctly defined as justified true belief. In addition, he tends to take it for granted that we do have
knowledge, and accordingly is less concerned than epistemologists nowadays to refute skepticism.
Nevertheless his views about knowledge, even when they have a different focus from recent
epistemological theories, bear importantly on these modern issues.

To most philosophers, such phrases as “Plato’s theory of knowledge,” “Plato’s epistemology,” and
“epistemological Platonism” bring to mind two main theses about knowledge – “knowledge” being the
standard translation of the Greek noun epistEmE. One of these theses says that human beings do indeed
have knowledge, and that it concerns something “real” or “objective.” The other says that knowledge
concerns, mainly or exclusively, nonsensible, nonphysical objects. The former thesis is the more
fundamental. The latter has seemed to many philosophers, including Plato, to follow from the former
together with certain other claims.

The former thesis obviously combines two subtheses. One is that we do have knowledge, that is, that
some people sometimes know this or that. The other subthesis is that our knowledge is about “reality”
or “what (really) is, to (ontos) ôn, or – in another possible formulation, which incorporates a bit of
interpretation of what the subthesis amounts to – what is ‘objective’ or ‘objectively so.’”

In addition to the two main theses about knowledge, it is necessary to include in any discussion of
Plato’s epistemology a further set of issues. These concern, not knowledge in the sense of that term that
is now usual, but rather what we call “understanding.” This is not to say that the Greek words usually
translated by the English word “know” (esp. epistasthai, gignOskein, eidenai) should be translated
instead by the word “understand” (though in some contexts that is advisable and is indeed sometimes
done). Rather it is to say that Plato’s views about what we call knowledge are inextricably bound up with
his thoughts about understanding.

The understanding in question is of two types. One is the understanding of things and facts and the like
– the kind of understanding that is provided by what we now think of as scientific “explanation.” For
example we might speak of someone as understanding superconductors or their structure, or the
movements of the planets, or bacteria, or how some bacteria survive high temperatures. Here we see a
link between Plato’s epistemology and what would nowadays be called his “philosophy of science” –
“science” being another common translation, suited to some contexts, of epistEmE. Plato himself drew
no distinction between the philosophy of science and epistemology. Equally, while considerations
concerning mathematics play a major role in his thinking about these issues, and mathematical
knowledge as a premier case of knowledge, he marked no separation between epistemology and the
philosophy of mathematics.

1
From: The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy (2003) Edited by Christopher Shields. Blackwell
Publishing. Chapter 5.
A different-seeming type of understanding that is relevant here has to do with the understanding of
propositions, with the contents or meanings of statements, or with sentences, or other such linguistic
and conceptual understanding. Here a connection with the notion of knowledge is not hard to see. In
order to know a certain proposition, it seems to be necessary to understand that proposition, or in some
sense to know what it is or means.

Plato plainly believed that these two general types of understanding are closely connected, and indeed
scarcely distinguished them at all. Accordingly one cannot separate his theory of knowledge from what
one might call his theory of understanding or his – as it is sometimes called – philosophy of thought.
Indeed, the best way to investigate this whole area of Plato’s philosophy – and in fact almost all of it – is
to regard it as a philosophical explanation of thinking, especially of reasonable and successful thinking
broadly construed.

A further departmental boundary that Plato did not draw and would not have wished to draw is the
boundary between epistemology and what is often called “metaphysics.” There are two reasons for this
that are worth mentioning here. One is this: Plato maintained, as noted, that knowledge concerns what
is “real” or objective; but the notion of reality, to ôn, has been assigned by Aristotelian usage to
“metaphysics,” or the science of “the real qua real” (to ôn hei ôn), or, as we might say, the investigation
of “what it is (for something) to be objective.”

The second reason is this. Plato believed, and indeed took it as virtually axiomatic, that humans do
sometimes have knowledge. He also believed that in order for humans to have knowledge, certain
broad states of affairs must necessarily obtain, concerning the human mind or soul and also other things
that exist. The investigation of such states of affairs is normally assigned to metaphysics. There is
accordingly no distinction for Plato to draw between metaphysics, so construed, and the investigation of
the conditions necessary for human beings to have knowledge.

(Accordingly it is rather misleading to claim, as is sometimes done, that Plato accepted something much
like the twentieth-century tripartite account of conditions necessary and sufficient for knowledge, as
found, for example, in G. E. Moore, namely, that if S knows that P, then it must be the case that (1) P is
true, (2) S believes that P, and (3) S has good grounds for his belief that P. Even if we should agree to this
claim, which is dubious, we must note that Plato’s conception of what is involved in these conditions
involves far more metaphysics than is normally taken, in recent times, to be attached to these
conditions.)

The rest of this article will sketch some of the philosophically important features of this area of Plato’s
philosophy, the main questions with which he deals, and the relationships between them. Such a
specification is necessary. It is not possible to comprehend his thinking through an account that relies on
the unexplicated use of standard translations of his terminology. Rather one must focus largely on the
problems that he was trying to address.