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Socrates' Critique of Cognitivism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Wallace I. Matson  and
Adam Leite
Wallace I. Matson
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Adam Leite
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

Ethics and lexicography would seem, prima facie, to have little to do with each other. Yet Aristotle testifies that Socrates pursued both:

Socrates was busying himself about ethical matters and neglecting the world of nature as a whole but seeking the universal in these ethical matters, and fixed thought for the first time on definitions. Socrates occupied himself with the excellences of character, and in connection with them became the first to raise the problem of universal definitions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 66 , Issue 256 , April 1991 , pp. 145 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1991

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References

1 Aristotle, , Metaphysics 987b1, tr. Ross.Google Scholar

2 Ibid.,1078b17.

3 The Birth of Tragedy.

4 Dreyfus, Hubert, ‘The Socratic and Platonic Basis of Cognitivism’, Artificial Intelligence and Society 2 (1988), 99–112.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 100.

6 Ibid., 102.

7 Ibid.

8 Laches 190c.Google Scholar Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Plato in this paper are based on Jowett's translation, sometimes abridged or otherwise altered.

9 Dreyfus, , op. cit., 107.Google Scholar

10 Laches 191e.Google Scholar

11 Euthyphro 6e.Google Scholar

12 Dreyfus, , op. cit., 108Google Scholar

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., 99.

15 Heraclitus, fragments 94, 30 (Diels).

16 190e.

17 331e.

18 4e.

19 6e.

20 190c.

21 29e.

22 23b.

23 192a.

24 161b.

25 442d.

26 We can observe whether he acquiesces, but not whether he acquiesces cheerfully—and that qualification is integral to the definition.

27 175, emphasis added.

28 Protagoras 361bet passim.Google Scholar

29 And possibly Socrates too. Even if Socrates did not ‘separate the Forms’ he evidently recognized something common in all Xs that makes them Xs; and this need not be something specifiable by a check list. Judgment, insight, nous, phronesis are essential and not electronically replaceable.

30 Dreyfus, , op. cit., 107–109Google Scholar; this is an inference from the Plato-a-Cognitivist thesis and is not separately argued.

31 319e, 320c.

32 328a.

33 Gorgias 458e.Google Scholar

34 361b.

35 518c.

36 538cd.

37 538e.

38 Gorgias 460b.Google Scholar

39 499e.

40 97b.

41 The example, though not Socrates', is analogous to his treatment of the madman-owned weapon (Republic I 331bGoogle Scholar), the immodest beggar (Charmides 161Google Scholar), and the retreating cavalryman (Laches 191a).Google Scholar

42 Gorgias 499e, 500b.Google Scholar

43 Phaedo 69a.Google Scholar

44 Ibid.,82b.

45 99c.

46 506e.

47 464c.

48 464e.

49 500e.

50 465a.

51 501a.

52 Gorgias 503e.Google Scholar

53 601d.

54 601e.

55 Ibid.

56 270b. Somewhere between Gorgias and Phaedrus Plato promoted rhetoric to the status of technē, explicitly put on the same level as medicine.

57 271c–272a.

58 312c.

59 518c (Shorey translation).

60 518d (Shorey).

61 74a–75e.

62 86e.

63 98a.

64 This anti-Cognitivist model of knowledge and skill acquisition is amazingly similar to the one Dreyfus has developed, alluded to near the beginning of this paper.

65 532a.

66 538de.

67 539a–540a.

68 540a.

69 But perhaps not Aristotle, whom Michael Wedin (who is a Cognitivist) convincingly claims for his party in Mind and Imagination in Aristotle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988).Google Scholar