First "definitions" by Plato's Socrates

Abstract

Socrates' first attempt at "definitions" at Plato’s Meno 75b9-76e10 raises a controversial problem concerning the early development of what is called ‘Platonic Forms’. There Socrates, as preliminary answers to his famous "what is X (e.g. virtue, piety, justice, knowledge)?" questions, presents three examples stating what shape and colour respectively are: first, 'shape is the only one of the things that happens always to follow colour'. Second, 'shape is the limit of a solid'. Third, 'colour is an effluence of shapes commensurate with sight and perceptible'. Then, Socrates adds that the third one is worse than the others. Many commentators have found these, Socrates' final words puzzling, because the third example appears to be the best to state the essence (ousia) or the form (eidos) of colour. Consequently, no consensus has yet been reached over the question of why Socrates prefers his other 'definitions' which (especially the first) look irrelevant to 'Platonic Forms'. Two close, influential studies are currently available for interpreting this passage. Dominic Scott (CUP: 2006) suggests that the second statement is, as many other commentators believe, the best for Socrates and that it prepares for the well-known slave's geometrical examination and doctrine of recollection which appear later in the same dialogue. David Charles (OUP: 2006 and 2010), on the other hand, thinks that Socrates fails to distinguish two different kinds of questions, namely identificatory (the account of what the term X signifies) and essential (the essence of the thing signified). He supposes that Plato as a result commits himself to a doctrine that we have an a priori account for both of those questions before starting any a posteriori investigations. While I accept some of the points made in the course of those lines of interpretation, my paper attempts to give a clearer account to defend Plato's endeavour in this transitional dialogue. I shall argue that in this passage Plato's Socrates is rather concerned with an Empedoclean doctrine of sense-perception, identifying the problem of such 'proto-scientific' explanations of colour, but without undermining our sensory experience, which will better explain why the first two examples are better than the last. The great influence and significance of Gorgianic rhetoric will also be demonstrated, in conjunction with a materialist philosophy of language, upon the birth of Socratic dialectic, which is thought to be the first step in Plato's constructive project, beyond Socratic elenchus, in his middle dialogues.