Meno's opening question, "Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught?" is quickly redirected by Socrates to the question, "What is virtue?" on the grounds that one cannot speak about virtue without knowing what it is.
While this at first seems quite reasonable, I wonder what the nature of the problem here is. What constitutes knowing a thing (here virtue)? The discussion between Meno and Socrates moves on to the topic of definitions. Does knowing a thing demand that we have a definition for it? Is Socrates implying that all knowledge is verbal in the sense that one only knows what one can explain in words?
Furthermore, what exactly are definitions for? (I believe Postman has some comments on dictionaries in "End of Education".) How do they function in our attempt to use words as signs for signifieds?
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Lewis talked some about the "knowing" question in the perfect pentenant section of Mere Christianity...
ReplyDelete"We are in the same boat here. We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely imaginable from outside shows through into our own world. And if we cannot picture even the atoms of which our own world is built, of course we are not going to be able to picture this. Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it, that very fact would show it was not what it rofesses to be—the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning. You may ask what good will it be to us if we do not understand it. But that is easily answered. A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.