New World Notes: A LEVER TO MOVE THE MIND New World Notes: A LEVER TO MOVE THE MIND Now this is really interesting. I'll write something up about the experiment in question once I've had a chance to take a closer look.  ¶ #

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  One Socratic Method Does a physician heal the body? Does the cobbler make shoes? Is a physician useful to one who isn't sick?

Reading Book I of the Republic reminds me quite a bit of trying to learn German from a conversational German CD I once had where we constantly wondering about wether the cheese was any good. Repetitive consideration of simple cases. It's Socrates technique, but its something of a frustration read.

Doctors and shoe makers get a lot of attention, but ship's captains and musicians are also wondered about. In case you're wondering, they sail ships and make music respectively. Socrates' interlocutors seem to be able to answer questions about each of these individuals very easily

In the first instance, the specific crafts are suggested because Socrates is playing a clever sort of trick. If justice by justice is meant giving each his due, as suggested by Cephalos and defended by Polemarchus, and justice is what one does when not practicing any of the other arts, such as medicine, then justice must be a sort of preserving or keeping. If justice is like the other arts, then knowing justice implies that one knows well how to be take what is kept (as a physician should know about how to make people sick). Hence, the just person must be some kind of a thief.

In this case, one obvious rejoinder would be that justice is not like the various specific crafts.

In another instance, when attacking Thrashymachus' conjecture that justice is acting for the benefit of the strong, the comparison with medicine (and other arts) is made because the various crafts are done not for the sake of the practioner, but for the sake of those subordinate to the craft.

To refute Thrasymachus, we would need to accept that the practice of justice is like rather than unlike the practice of the other arts.

Getting a grip on the relation between justice and the other crafts, which it shares some characteristics and not others, well that's the goal of the dialog.

The question that every first time (and many subsequent time) readers of the dialogs is, why so repetitive, why go through so many cases? If examining one example of a craft doesn't serve as enough of a model for a general picture of how crafts in general operate, is three really a sufficient sample to support the generalization? No, its not really. Plato's theory of formal knowledge does allow him to make certain inferences from particular case to general cases based on a much smaller amount of "data" than thinkers working since the development of statistics. But then even one case should be enough to motivate some conclusions.

No, I think that Socrates is trying to impart a skill. The repetition is his way of showing the unskilled how argumentation is properly done. The comparison to language drills isn't really all that accidental after all.

Bear in mind that listening to me talk about Plato is somewhat like going to a cobbler when you're sick. Sophisticated readers should be able to find evidence in the text, Attic Greek or ancient pedagogical or social practices to support or, more likely, refute my position.
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