What does Socrates mean by this quote?

Factual Questions
21

If “know” can only mean “be 100% certain that it is sacred and eternally true” then what would you call information which has shown itself to be reliable enough for a given purpose? Do you know (I’m sorry, “know”) a term which isn’t contrived and can be commonly understood?

Again, with the hemlock: we don’t know that hemlock is poisonous, right? No problem ingesting it, right? We can’t say that we know that hemlock is poisonous? If not, what term could we use that doesn’t take a whole paragraph if not the word “know”? “Believe”? That doesn’t make a distinction with wishful thinking.

If there is only ignorance and knowing (where knowing refers to eternally true absolute sacred certainty) what word can we use to distinguish the between the fact that we are ignorant of whether or not there is life in other galaxies and the fact that we are ignorant of whether or not fire is hot?

22

Cube,

Just to be clear so that we reduce the likelyhood of misunderstading each other’s position, I’m strongly influenced by JS Mill and his fallibilism. I admit that I could be just a brain in a jar.

Yet we should have an easy to understand term that sits in-between having no information and absolute certainty. The vast majority of our problems, solutions and actions are predicated on that middle ground between “not the faintest clue” and “eternal sacred certainty”.

23

MichaelEmouse, I think that’s a bit finer than Socrates meant to cut it. As I understand it, he didn’t really have a problem with people professing what they knew firsthand, as long as they were open to different interpretations of what they saw.

Certainly it’s possible to point to our limited senses; limited perspective on a local scale, let alone galactic or universal, not to mention time; our imperfect memories, and our extraordinarily unpredictable reliability when it comes to interpreting all that…and conclude yeah, relatively speaking the wisest among us possesses the wit of an amoeba. But as we have done quite well ignoring all that and come up with stuff like Mazdas, pyramids and credit cards, there is something to be said in favor of pretending to know something. Kind of funny, really. Newton’s physics work just fine on a scale readily grasped by people. We can make stuff fly to the moon and back, we can make submarines, all kinds of great stuff. And yet at the particle-physics level we need a different set of rules.

If you’re looking for terms, you need look no further than the weasel words of the English language. Stuff like “believe” “think” “seem to recall”. Because yeah, nothing is really certain is it?

24

Reminds me of Grad school.

I graduated from college with a degree in Mathematics. Damn, I really knew my shit. I was a Math GOD.

Went to grad school…graduated and realized I didn’t know shit about Math.

25

Sure, and I think “know” is a fine word to use for the majority of the time we’re not certain or hopelessly ignorant. It’s just helpful (to me, at least, I’m not claiming to be a philosopher here) to remember that underneath it all is a core of ignorance. It puts things in perspective.

Ask “why” enough times, and the answer (if you’re honest with yourself) always comes back to “I don’t know”, or “It’s just a guess”, or “That’s an assumption I made”. And I think wise people keep that in mind. If the politicians and terrorists of the world thought that way we’d all be better off.

And I keep it in mind when debating people, too. My goal as a debater is to step backwards through the logic until my opponent and I find something fundamental we agree on. If that’s the case, I can build a logical argument on that common ground and often convince them my conclusion is right, but sometimes they convince me instead.

What usually happens though, is that we get all the way down to the “ignorance” layer until we find out where we disagree. And then it’s just a matter of “I take this axiom, you take that one, and so we’re at an impasse.” I learn something about how other people build their structures of knowledge on ignorance, and I try to impart to them why I feel the way I do. But by then we’ve gotten past the logic and reason portion of that debate, and hopefully go our separate ways amicably.

With an ideologue, however, you end up talking past each other until you’re blue in the face, and feelings get hurt. In the worst case, people die. Hence why wisdom lies in knowing that you know nothing.

26

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. - Bertrand Russell

You may like reading JS Mill’s On Liberty and Karl Popper’s Conjectures and refutations.
Also, the 11th episode of Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man is pretty good: - YouTube . You might enjoy the whole series.

27

I don’t think it’s right to assimilate Socrates’s concern for knowledge with a concern for certainty. He doesn’t go around asking people “how can you be certain?”

Rather, he’s trying to figure out just exactly what it is people are saying they know in the first place. Not how can they be certain–just, what is it they even think they know? In the ensuing dialogue, the idea is that in each case he finds out they can’t even say what it is they know. They’ll give statements–but the statements turn out to be so full of confusions or contradictions we can’t even say what they were trying to communicate in the first place.

Socrates isn’t looking for “certain truths,” he’s looking for truths about which we can “give an account.” The source of his frustration is that the account never seems to be forthcoming. People seem to go around believing things, without really knowing what their beliefs mean or why they should be believed. It’s not about certainty, it’s about, something more like, coherence, and the ability to generalize to things outside one’s own immediate experience.

28

One more question:

Socrates said, “An honest man is always a child.”

But then he also says, “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”

Now by the definition of honest it means, “Free of deceit and untruthfulness; sincere.” So more concretely, it means being free of untruthfulness, which means that you don’t speak untruthful words, which means you don’t speak false words. If you don’t speak false words, then you the only words you speak are true.

So false words are evil (and “infect the soul with evil”), which means that if you speak false words, then you’re evil (and so is your soul). Since true words are the opposite of false words, they are also the opposite of evil, which is “good” (look in the antonyms section), so if you speak true words, then you’re good. If you only speak true words, then you’re not only good, but you’re also honest as the definition of honest is, “Free of deceit and untruthfulness; sincere.” But if you’re honest, then you’re a child. But remember, being honest is good, as the only way you can be honest is if you only speak true words, and if you only speak true words then you’re good. So does that mean that being a child is good?

See, that’s what I don’t get. Socrates is basically saying that being a child is good. Is it a good thing? That’s a little questionable…

But here’s the real contradiction. The definition of “child” is, “A young human being below the age of full physical development or below the legal age of majority.” But the definition of man" is, “An adult human male.” So a man can only be an adult human male. But the definition of “adult” is, “A person who is fully grown or developed.” So if a child is a person that is not fully physically developed, an adult is a person who is is fully developed (which means that he/she is fully developed), and a man is an adult male, then a man cannot be a child. So how can an honest man be a child?

And if you’re thinking about why I’m defining so many terms, just look at my signature. According to Socrates, “The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.” So evidently, there’s going to be a lot of defining.

So doesn’t that mean that this quote, “An honest man is always a child,” is contradictory?

29

What is the source of all of these Socrates quotes you’re coming up with?

30

From apps, websites, and books. I am trusting them because they all seem consistent. Almost every source I’ve been to (whether it’s reliable or not) have the exact same quotes.

31

Another problem:

He also says, “Children nowadays are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannise their teachers.”

So if you’re a child, you’re a tyrant. And as discussed above, being a child is good, so does that mean that being a tyrant is good?

32

Yes, that is exactly what he meant. Remember, “Tyrant” had a different connotation then.

33

But that means that being an honest man is being a tyrant, as an honest man is always a child.

34

Have you ever considered reading complete works, for the sake of context? Random quotes and paraphrases can be misleading.

Besides, that’s what he told me himself, when I sat near him on the No. 6 train going to South Street Seaport last week.

35

Anonymous User, a couple of things to say here.

For one thing I’m not confident every quote you’re discussing is actually from the Socratic corpus. You’re going to want to find them in the actual works of Plato before taking them too seriously. Many, many, many contemporary inventions are spuriously attributed to famous figures–in particular, Einstein and Socrates are two very common victims of this.

With that said, even if every quote you’re discussing is genuine, you’re approaching things the wrong way. You can’t treat Socrates’s words as aphorisms. Every word we have from him is part of a more or less extensive dialogue with all kinds of complex background informing the meaning of what he said at any particular moment in the text. You need to at least read large passages, if not (for whatever reason) the works as a whole. Socrates simply wasn’t an aphorist. He didn’t deliver one-liners. He engaged in dialogue, and he has to be read that way.

36

For example, the only place online where I can find an actual citation for “an honest man is always a child” attributes it, not to Socrates, but to the later Latin writer Martial: Honesty - Wikiquote

Now it could be that Socrates did say it somewheres, but I am currently skeptical. Everywhere I see it attributed to Socrates, I see no actual reference to where the quotation is from. Meanwhile, where I see an actual reference, the attribution turns out not to be to Socrates.

But anyway, the main point is–Plato is best read at the long passage or even the book level. One-liners do not really explain what’s going on in the Socratic corpus. The way you’re reading him reminds me of how people used to treat the Bible in my churches growing up–as a series of pick-and-choose “bible verses” that you can pull out for this occasion or that. Works in a pinch, I guess, but is fundamentally missing the point.