Empiricist platonic epistemology and the internalist-externalist debate in the Theaetetus
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2020
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Abstract
If epistemology can be characterized as the theory of knowledge and its justification, and if it is certain that (as I set out to argue) the Platonic remarks against the perceptual definition of knowledge go beyond what usually is taken to be epistemology, Plato’s epistemology in Theaetetus does not look very epistemological from a contemporary perspective. In this paper, I argue that Plato does not limit his view of what knowledge is to the theoretical sphere, but also considers how a description of what knowledge is would work in the practical domain. Thus, he was also concerned with stressing the connections between the theoretical and practical realms, thus indicating that the theoretical discussion of knowledge cannot be conceptualized independently of what it means at the practical level. Second, I also suggest that Plato was aware of the so-called debate about the first and the third person authority in knowledge; he noted (and to some extent endorsed) the view that no one can know better than oneself what oneself is perceptually experiencing when oneself is experiencing it. If this is right, Plato, even rejecting the thesis that knowledge is perception, somehow favors Protagoras’ relativist view (every doxa is true for the person whose doxa it is) and, at this specific point, the homo mensura thesis understood in this way seems to contain a bulk of truth.