Question

how platos meno relate to theory

Answer 1

Plato's Meno incorporates elements of socratic ethics and platonic epistemology into a fictional dialog that has been set in the last years of Socrates ' life between significant political events and cultural concerns. It starts as Meno's blunt, prepackaged debater question about whether virtue can be taught, and soon becomes an open and inconclusive quest for the essence of this elusive "virtue," or human goodness in general. Platonic concepts of immortality, arithmetic, and a "recollection" of wisdom unlearned in this lifetime by experience.

A model geometry lesson with an uneducated slave is intended to demonstrate the value of being aware of our own ignorance, the essence of proper education, the gap between knowledge and true belief, and the likelihood of knowing things without teaching. As the discussion returns to Meno's initial question about how virtue can be taught, Socrates proposes another way about questioning, a "hypothesis" process, by which he suggests that virtue must be some form of intelligence, and so it must be something that is taught. But then Socrates also argues the reverse, that because virtue is never actually taught, after all, it does not seem to be knowledge.

This reformulation of Meno's argument has come to be regarded as "Meno's Paradox." It is Plato's first chance to present his infamous "recollection theory," and is an early illustration of what would later be considered an inborn ideas theory. If a mind should still be in a state of studying something, then there would be no point at which that thing would be learned. This paradoxical phrasing turns the initial assertion of the theory of memory, which expanded a common-sense notion of learning from experience over a series of successive lifetimes, into the beginnings of a philosophy of unconscious ideas, since the geometrical values or principles still belong to the mind at all times.