Plato
Plato argues to Meno that all knowledge is already present in our immortal souls. By this he suggests that learning is simply a matter of recollection and not teaching. Socrates goes on to prove his point to Meno through the illustration of having a slave boy perform steps of geometry that no one had ever taught him. Through this he demonstrates that knowledge can be arrived upon easily just by asking the right questions, a stiff argument for his inborn knowledge theory. Plato comes to this "doctrine of recollection" for the reason that, after all of his thinking it seems impossible to know something without already knowing it. Saying that you know F=MA would be very difficult without having already known about it and all the things surrounding it (forces and accelerations and just physics in general), while many other concepts would be out of our grasp without knowing F=MA. You would have to have some sort of concepts of force and mass, how else would you explain them? To just simply come up with this idea would be impossible according to Plato. In order to explain this he proposed this argument. The style which Plato uses to prove his point is by asking questions until the knowledge has been "recalled". This style has taken
Now you will notice that the larger the vehicle the larger this engine must be. Assuming that this is what Plato meant, it makes an interesting plea for us to discover our inborn knowledge. It is not merely coincidence that people talk about 'giving of their wisdom' or the such-like, rather than saying 'giving their wisdom' since 'give' is clearly not being used in a normal sense. Even if a soul were to have existed time and time again, knowledge cannot be created without fore knowing it. This idea, while not an easy argument to support, seems to me to be a much more plausible one. If taken literally Plato's argument would seem highly suspect, since it would suggest that everyone is reincarnated again and again. It would appear that knowledge is simply a matter of asking ourselves the right questions. He suggests that when we are born the neural connections in our brain that arrive at knowledge are already present; we simply need to awaken them. There are several flaws, though, in Plato's doctrine of recollection. I mean, after all, would people not be more likely to search for knowledge under the assumption they simply have to recall it and not go through a long and arduous process of creating it? Especially since as Plato would argue that knowledge like energy cannot be created, because his exhaustive search for knowledge left him with only questions and no answers, and given the progress made in philosophy this would seem a probable belief. You probably know that the power of a car or truck is supplied by the engine. If giving is a process which requires the first person to lose the thing that they give then clearly knowledge is not given, but that certainly doesn't rule out the possibility of there being knowledge. Then does this not leave us in the same place as before? If this knowledge came from our other worldly experiences, then what has happened to it; are we to believe that some black hole of knowledge has taken place and we are left without all knowledge which is still contained in our soul yet has been wiped from the face of this earth? Perhaps in ethereal world, Plato suggests that a higher power imparted this knowledge to us. Another unnecessary distraction would be that of Plato's suggestion that learning cannot occur since it would have to be a process of giving, where a teacher gives knowledge to a pupil, but that it cannot be giving since when someone gives something to someone else they don't have it any more.
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Acceptance Essays
