Toomas Lott

This paper offers an explanation of why Plato, in his later dialogues, begins to view the capacity of belief formation as necessarily involving the reasoning part of the soul. I will argue that the standard explanation, according to which for later Plato forming beliefs requires cognitive access to intelligibles (Forms), is unsatisfactory. My focus will be on the passage from Plato’s Theaetetus (184B-187A), which is crucial for understand- ing Plato’s notion of belief. I will argue that this passage does not support the standard explanation, and develop an alternative reading of the passage, according to which forming a belief is a goal-directed activity aiming at truth. In other words, it is the epistemic goal of forming beliefs that matters for Plato, not the cognitive preconditions.

If there is widespread disagreement in an intellectual community, are its members in some sense failing epistemically? In this paper, I will offer a reconstruction of the first sustained attempt to answer this question. The attempt is made in the Alcibiades, a dialogue attributed to Plato. There, Socrates argues that the disagreeing parties lack knowledge. I will offer a reconstruction of this argument. Socrates relies on a controversial premiss according to which systematic and persistent disagreement within a group is an indication that its individual members lack knowledge. This claim rests on an optimistic assumption, explicit in the Alcibiades, that a person who possesses knowledge in a domain is able to persuade the audience and bring it to an agreement with the speaker. Knowledge, if present, spreads within the community unobstructed.