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Meno Case

Essay by   •  October 31, 2012  •  Term Paper  •  987 Words (4 Pages)  •  1,544 Views

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Meno

Questioning and learning. Such is the way people have been leading their lives since the longest time. We question to learn the answer. No one could possibly live without ever questioning anything, which means never getting any answers, and thus not learning any knowledge to get by. However, not all questions can be easily answered; some, for instance, "does god exist?", even continues to create more questions than answers. If so, then, how do we start trying to learn something when we do not know whether or not there is an answer to which our questions are directed?

Meno argues:

"How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know" (80d).

Thus is his famous "Paradox of Inquiry" that has kept philosophers busy for thousands of centuries. Reformulating it, the paradox conveys three (3) main points:

1. If one knows what one is looking for, inquiry is unnecessary.

2. If one does not know what one is looking for, inquiry is impossible.

3. Ergo, inquiry is either unnecessary or impossible.

By peeling each layer of the paradox, a single implicit premise could be drawn: it is either one knows what one is looking for or one does not know. However, while said premise could be considered as a logical truth, there is an ambiguity lingering. Consider this: can one possibly knows what one does not know? In one sense, we could answer "no" as one cannot both knows and does not know the same thing at the same time. On the flipside, a "yes" is also a plausible answer as one can know the questions one does not have the answer to. In other words, inquiry is possible through means of figuring out what question one wants to answer; do some appropriate measure for answering that type of question; and finally getting the previously unknown answer to the question. Therefore, I deduce the argument for Meno's Paradox of Inquiry is flawed as it displays an illusion of a sound argument, when it really is not.

Yet, Socrates sees the depth beyond it and thus proposes his famous "Theory of Recollection". In essence, it suggests that the human soul is immortal, cycles through life and death, retaining everything it had learned, and thus the process of learning really is a process of remembering (81c - d).

Socrates then tries to prove his theory by "questioning" one of Meno's slave boy who is oblivious to geometry. he proceeds to draw geometric figures and demonstrates the boy's initial unawareness of the length of side needed to double the area of a square with two-foot sides. Doubling the length of the original sides is what the boy immediately guesses he must do. When it is proven to be incorrect, he then guesses that it must be three feet long, which

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