From the Beginning to Plato

346 PLATO: METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY
could have given you the ability to think of her. But perception of the sensible
equals may revive our latent knowledge, and once we are aware of Equality we
may carry out a dialectical enquiry leading to complete knowledge of it.
In the Meno, recollection explains a slave boy’s ability to think of a
mathematical truth; call it ‘p’. Plato reasons: the slave boy produces this thought
that p so it must have already been in him. Since nothing the slave boy
experienced since birth could have put it into him, he must have become aware
of it before birth (cf. Phaedo 73a–b). What Plato finds puzzling, what requires
explanation, is the slave boy’s ability to think of the mathematical fact, and it is
by explaining this that the recollection theory explains the slave boy’s ability to
make a judgement about and, later, 52 to know the mathematical fact. This is the
more natural for Plato because his picture of thought as an active awareness of
some being in the world makes it hard to distinguish thinking and knowing.
Now, the correct explanation of the slave boy’s ability is, at one level,
straightforward. The sentence asserting that p is composed of words the meaning
of which the slave boy already knows. And it is simply a fact about human
beings that they can construct new statements and know what they are saying as
long as they know the meanings of the words in the statement and can follow the
relevant linguistic rules.
Only in the Sophist will Plato begin to appreciate the importance of the
difference between the ways in which words and statements function. In earlier
dialogues, statements are understood to be assigned to beings in the same way as
names. 53
Related confusions can be found in Plato’s failure adequately to discriminate
(1) objects and facts; (2) knowledge of objects and knowledge of facts; (3)
propositions and facts.
Plato nowhere distinguishes an ontological category of facts as distinct from
objects; both are referred to indifferently as ‘beings’. Stating a fact with a
sentence or thinking a thought is seen by Plato as a reference to or an awareness
of some reality external to the thinker which is, furthermore, identified with the
content of the thought, namely the fact in question. What is said is quite naturally
identified with the fact—the reality—reported. 54
So Plato sees the slave boy as someone who has some general mathematical
truth, p, as the content of his thought, where this is identified with the fact that p
‘grasped’ by the slave boy’s mind. In thinking that p the slave boy is related to
and aware of some part of reality outside himself, and just as I could not think of
an object I had never experienced, so Plato believes the slave boy could not think
of and be aware of the fact that is the content of his thought if he had never
experienced it before. As he has not experienced it since birth, he must have
done so before birth.
In the Meno the recollection theory is also relevant to the paradox of enquiry
raised before Socrates’ examination of the slave boy. The paradox is stated in
two ways that are not equivalent: