Meno

Meno asks a second famous question, the Meno Problem. It asks why knowledge is better than “opinion,” or traditional beliefs. Socrates answers that opinions can be correct, and in that sense as useful as knowledge, but that knowledge is superior, since it is chained to experience and solidified by the soul’s recollection of truths already learned during its many incarnations.

People understand many things intuitively; Socrates believes this is because their immortal souls, reincarnated endlessly, have acquired a basic understanding of every important thing in the universe. This explains how an untutored enslaved man can quickly grasp the relationship of the area of a square to the length of its side, and how anyone can learn a new subject without knowing beforehand how to judge correct and wrong information within that subject. Experience enchains new information to recollection and makes it enduring and reliable.

Meno believes that “justice is virtue” (7), or perhaps that governance itself is virtue, as if merely to be a leader is virtuous. Socrates replies that justice may be a form of virtue, but it isn’t the entire category. He gives as an example a person who defines roundness as figure, when in fact roundness is merely an example of a figure—squares and triangles and other shapes are figures as well—then adds that it would make no sense to say that whiteness is color when it’s simply one type of color alongside red, blue, orange, and so on. Thus, Meno’s definition of virtue is merely one attribute of virtue.

The soul, according to Socrates, is an essence common to all humans; every soul is immortal, reborn endlessly, and has long since acquired all essential knowledge about everything in the universe. This resolves Meno’s Paradox because a person’s soul, when prompted, will “recollect” needed knowledge without having to “learn how to learn” to judge wrong and right information.

Meno asks whether someone who doesn’t know the answer to a question can ever know for sure that they have found the answer. Socrates replies that human souls are reborn, over and over, and in time come to know the answers to most things, if they can be stimulated by good questions to recollect that information. To prove this, Socrates asks Meno to bring forth an attending enslaved man, a man untutored in math. Socrates draws for the enslaved man a square and shows that the figure’s side multiplied by its length gives the area inside the square. The enslaved man quickly grasps this idea.

Socrates then asks the enslaved man what length would double the square’s area; the enslaved man guesses a length twice that of the original square. Socrates shows him that this would generate an area not two, but four times bigger. Together they reason that the side of a square with twice the area would be longer than a side from the first square but not twice as long. Socrates then draws a large square made up of the smaller squares, adds diagonals through those squares, and proves to the enslaved man that the diagonal of a square, when multiplied by itself, generates twice the area of the square. They have found the length that doubles the area, and the enslaved man understands this intuitively. This, declares Socrates, proves that the enslaved man already knows the answer and simply needs to recollect it.