Whitney Schwab

Recollection is central to the epistemology of Plato’sMeno. After all, the character Socrates claims that recollection is the process whereby embodied human souls bind down true opinions (doxai) and acquire knowledge (epistêmê). This paper examines the exchange between Socrates and Meno’s slave to determine (1) what steps on the path to acquiring knowledge are part of the process of recollection and (2) what is required for a subject to count as having recollected something. I argue that the key to answering these questions is to get clear on the kind of process recollection is supposed to be. In particular, I argue that recollection is a process akin to the kind of process Aristotle calls “changes” (kinêseisor incompleteenergeiai). The key feature of such processes is that they aim at an end beyond themselves and are not complete until that end comes about. In the case of recollection, the end is knowledge, but inferior mental states, such as false opinion, puzzlement (aporia), and...

Plato in the Meno is standardly interpreted as committed to condition innatism: human beings are born with latent innate states of knowledge. Against this view, Gail Fine has argued for prenatalism: human souls possess knowledge in a disembodied state but lose it upon being embodied. We argue against both views and in favor of content innatism: human beings are born with innate cognitive contents that can be, but do not exist innately in the soul as, the contents of states of knowledge. Content innatism has strong textual support and constitutes a philosophically interesting theory.

This paper deals with Pyrrhonian skepticism. It argues that the central argument presented by Jonathan Barnes in favor of the view that skepticism precludes the possession of any belief fails. In brief, Barnes maintains that, because skepticism requires suspending judgment whether criteria of truth exist, no skeptic can, consistently with her skepticism, possess a criterion of truth; this entails, he argues, that no skeptic can make any judgments about anything and, hence, cannot come to possess any beliefs. I evaluate this argument in two ways: first, if we understand criteria of truth along the lines proposed by Sextus’ Hellenistic opponents, the argument fails because such criteria were introduced to guarantee that at least some of our beliefs could count as knowledge, and not to guarantee the very possibility of making judgments in the first place. Second, if we broaden our conception of a criterion of truth, such that a criterion is any standard against which an impression can ...

This paper reconstructs the conception of epistēmē advanced in Plato’s Republic and defends the claim that epistēmē of perceptibles is impossible from two long-standing objections: that it is philosophically implausible and that it undermines Socrates’ argument that philosophers should rule. The paper argues that epistēmē consists in grasping how a fact either is a fact about or is grounded in facts about natures. It was thus natural for Socrates to rule out epistēmē of perceptibles, since the fact (as he sees it) that predicates apply to perceptibles only in certain circumstances plausibly entails that facts about perceptibles are not appropriately grounded in facts about natures. Nevertheless, philosophers’ opinions (doxai) concerning perceptibles are authoritative because they are informed by their epistēmē of intelligibles (in an analogous way, it is here suggested, to how doctors’ medical opinions concerning particular matters of health are authoritative because they are informed by their understanding of health).

At the end of the Meno, the character Socrates famously claims that true doxa is distinguished from epistēmē by a working out of the explanation (aitias logismos). I examine the whole dialogue to argue that working out the explanation consists, for Socrates, in seeing how the fact to be explained is grounded in facts about the natures of the relevant fundamental entities of the domain to which it belongs. I then reconstruct the conception of epistēmē that results from Socrates’ claim that acquiring epistēmē requires working out an explanation. Once that reconstruction is complete, I first argue that notions of epistemic justification are out of place in interpreting the Meno and then appeal to recent work in epistemology to settle the long-standing question of whether Socrates’ account of epistēmē is better interpreted as an account of knowledge or as an account of understanding, arguing that it is more charitably taken in the latter way. Moreover, I argue that Socrates’ account of epistēmē provides possible insights that any philosopher interested in the nature of understanding should take seriously.

In this paper I examine, and reject, one of the chief philosophical arguments that purports to show that Pyrrhonian Skepticism is incompatible with possessing any beliefs. That argument, first put forward by Jonathan Barnes and since accepted by many philosophers, focuses on the skeptic's resolute suspension of judgment concerning one philosophical issue, namely whether criteria of truth exist. In short, the argument holds that, because skeptics suspend judgment whether criteria of truth exist, they have no basis on which to discriminate between their impressions, which is a necessary condition for belief formation. I show that this argument fails because it misunderstands both the nature of criteria of truth and the epistemic consequences of suspending judgment concerning their existence. Thus, I clear the main philosophical obstacle preventing an interpretation of Pyrrhonism as consistent with possessing beliefs (associated most famously with Michael Frede).