1 Harvard University Political Theory Colloquium For 11 March 2010 ...

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Protagoras to an acknowledgement of the power of knowledge, hence can be used to
refute his view that courage is entirely different from knowledge, but it cannot be
seriously ascribed to Socrates as the entirety of the latter’s position. Were it so, then
Socrates would be straightforwardly committed to the view that because virtue is
knowledge, it must be teachable (by sophists or others): yet this is precisely the claim
which he highlights as aporetic at the end of the dialogue (361b). On the other hand,
Socrates has signaled that this is a joint refutation, and so there must be a sense in which
he too can be interpreted as agreeing to the position – even though that agreement must
be interpreted so as to insulate it from the implication that virtue is (sophistically)
teachable.
The clue to a resolution lies at 357b, where Socrates says ‘what exactly this art,
this knowledge is, we can inquire into later; that it is knowledge of some sort is enough
for the demonstration which Protagoras and I have to give in order to answer the question
you [the many, putatively] asked us.’ (trans. Lombardo & Bell). As others have
observed (among them Ferrari 1992: 125-6), this is a hint that the measure doctrine is not
to be read as Socratic gospel. 18 That doctrine has served to refute the many – to show
them that ‘if you laugh at us now, you will be laughing at yourselves (357d) – but has
not in itself made clear the (executive) nature of knowledge or its relation to virtue.
Immediately following the crucial caveat at 357b, Socrates recalls the starting
point of what I have called the inner frame discussion between him and Protagoras: he
recalls that the specter of the many was raised ‘when we were agreeing that nothing was
stronger than knowledge, which always prevails, whenever it is present, over pleasure
and everything else’ (357c, dropping ‘or better’ supplied without support by Lombardo &
Bell). The back-reference is to the inner frame proper at 352b, where Socrates
challenged Protagoras whether he agreed with ‘most people’ who think that knowledge
‘is not a powerful thing, neither fit to lead nor fit to rule’, but rather that knowledge may
be present in a person even though and when ‘what rules him [often] is not knowledge,
but rather anything else’ (i.e., anger, pleasure, pain, love, fear). What Socrates and
Protagoras had agreed upon at 352b – but which is subsequently silently elided in the
transformation of the measure doctrine into a justification for sophistic teaching for pay –
is the identification of knowledge as inherently ruling. And this, I submit, is the hidden