Meno's Paradox - Plains Art Museum

Plato’s Meno dramatizes the challenge of a powerful skeptical paradox. Meno’s paradox attacks the popular assumption that we can acquire knowledge by means of inquiry. The specific target of Meno’s argument is inquiry about the nature of human excellence, but the problem generalizes to cover the possibility of acquiring knowledge about any topic, call it ‘X’:

How will you look for it [X], Socrates, when you do not know at all what it [X] is? How will you aim to search for something [X] you do not know at all? If you should meet with it [X], how will you know that this [X] is the thing that you did not know? (Plato, Meno 80d, Grube translation)

To make this more familiar, think about looking for your keys. You can’t recall where you left them, and you start looking for them around your house, in the places you typically leave them. If you find them, it is because you do know what your keys look like. Only thus do you recognize them when you finally lay eyes on them. That means finding presupposes already knowing what you are looking for. But when what we are looking for isn’t a thing (like keys) but knowledge of some sort (in the case of the Meno, knowledge of what it is to be excellent), then we can only find what we are looking for if we already know what we are looking for. And then we aren’t finding it because we already know it! What are we to make of this Catch-22?

Presented by Andrew D. Cling