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

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15 Compare the sophist’s conventional scorn for the many as irrelevant rabble at 353a:
‘why is it necessary for us to investigate the opinion of ordinary people, who will say
whatever occurs to them?’.
16 See the similar claim made in Gombay 1988.
17 This also better explains the third-personal feature of the reference to ‘the many’
themselves which Raphael Woolf has discussed than his own explanation of the practical
insignificance of their form of word-deed inconsistency (Woolf 2002); this is a point to
which I return in my conclusion.
18 Ferrari 1992: 127 also notes the aporia at the end of the dialogue as a second hint that
the measure doctrine is not to be taken as gospel. However, he mislocates the problem
raised in the aporia, viewing it as a failure of Socrates to have proven to Protagoras that
virtue is knowledge.
19 On the role of the virtues in the Laws, including the two definitions of sôphrosunê as
enkrateia and as sumphônia between desires and the good, see Bobonich 2002: 288-92,
esp. 289-90. He discusses the ‘reciprocity of the virtues’ as maintained, but with
changing defenses and explanations, from the middle dialogues to the Laws.
20 This is the best way to explain Socrates’ single use of ‘knows or believes’ (358c) in
what is otherwise an account of what is distinctive to knowledge per se, a use which
C.C.W. Taylor (1976) in his commentary ad. loc. can only gloss as a simple mistake.
‘Knows or believes’ signals that the important thing is not the cognitive possession, but
the role that it plays. As the Theaetetus shows, belief can play a ruling role analogous to
that of knowledge, though it cannot do so securely and perfectly.