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ABSTRACT
At the centre of Plato’s Euthydemus lie a series of arguments in which Socrates’ interlocutors, the sophists Euthydemus and Dionysodorus propose a radical account of truth (‘chopped logos’) according to which there is no such thing as falsehood, and no such thing as disagreement (here ‘counter-saying’). This account of truth is not directly refutable; but in response Socrates offers a revised account of ‘saying’ focussed on the different aspects of the verb (perfect and imperfect) to give a rich account of saying, of truth and of knowledge. I argue that Socrates’ response has much to offer, notably in its amplification of the process of saying and cognition, and the development of virtue.
Acknowledgments
As always, I have incurred many debts in writing this paper: I would like to thank everyone whom I have bored with the Euthydemus over the last years; and Michael Sharp for his patience in waiting for what should be a longer discussion of the dialogue. I should like especially to thank Joachim Aufderheide, Peter Baumann, Dom Bailey, Charles Brittain, Tim Clarke, Nick Denyer, Gail Fine, Verity Harte, Fiona Leigh, Nils Kurbis, David Sedley and Raphael Woolf; I also owe a great debt to the students with whom I have discussed the dialogue—notably Merrick Anderson, Ian Campbell, Mike Coxhead, Saloni de Souza, Marta Heckel and Daniel Vazquez.
[Note: this paper was completed in 2015, and I have left it, including its acknowledgments, as it was sent to the commentators then, apart from some minor corrections. I have incurred many further debts in thinking about the Euthydemus since, which I shall acknowledge in the appropriate place.]
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I have chosen to use ‘say’ and cognates for the Greek verb legein and its cognates, including logos. In what follows I amplify the point; but it is important to keep in play from the outset the possibility that the semantic field of leg- and cognates is somehow unified. I have followed this strategy for the verbal form, legein (‘say’), for the nominal form, logos (‘saying’), and for the compound verb antilegein (‘countersaying’); see below n. 5. I am defeated by dialegesthai, which appears in Socrates’ opening speech at 271a4, to describe something like conversation—the conversation which the sophists, by the end of the dialogue, are unable to enjoy. For reasons of space I have not given the Greek text; and I have transliterated the Greek expressions throughout.
2 Is this the point of deinô—‘wicked-clever’, to adopt Charles Brittain’s phrase—to describe their skill?
3 This is a common account of the role of the sophists: see Chance [Citation1992: 18ff] on the status quaestionis at his time of writing. Compare what may be the misguided view of the Anonymous [Isocrates] at 305a.
4 Compare, for example, Apology 26b for ‘discussion’; Protagoras 336c for ‘account’; Heraclitus DK 22B31 for ‘amount’ or ‘reckoning’. On the realist account of truth, suggested by the sophists, there is a counterpart expression which has been better treated in the literature than legein: einai, ‘is’. See, notably, Brown [Citation1999], Burnyeat [Citation2002], Frede [Citation1967], Kahn [Citation1973].
5 On the principle enunciated above, at n.1, I prefer ‘say’ as the most neutral translation for legein throughout, in order to show up the shiftiness of the argument—but see Denyer [Citation1991] who starts out with ‘state’.
6 Antilegein is often translated ‘contradiction’ but this, in English at least, gets confused with a connected theme in the dialogue, the Principle of Non-Contradiction (see McCabe [Citation2006, Citation2013]). ‘Countersaying’ is obsolete in English, unfortunately, but I use the expression to ensure that the legein root is with us all the time. I have wondered about ‘counterspeaking’ (but it seems to describe the physical utterance) or ‘counterstating’ (perhaps too technical; but here see Denyer, [Citation1991]), and their correlates ‘speaking’ and ‘stating’ throughout. But all of these are themselves theory-laden; so I use this defunct expression just to keep theory out from the outset.
7 It is important throughout to notice that the sophists themselves eschew theory: their project is to foist theoretical positions on others. So their dialectical position is quite tricky; and this too affects how we should take Socrates’ attempt to show that they self-refute. However, in what follows I short-circuit the complexity of whether these are or are not theories that belong to the sophists, and label them simply as ‘sophistic’. I think there is in the end, for my present purposes, no heavy price to pay for that ellipse. In a full consideration of the self-refutations, however, this is a fundamental issue.
8 This is one reason to reject the recent fashion for describing only the Socratic episodes of the dialogue as ‘protreptic’
9 Hence the strong ethical content of the first Socratic episode, 278–281.
10 Notice the opening gambit of what the sophists teach, 273d ff.
11 The resolute present tenses here are, I think, deliberate, and tricky to render; they connect with the dialogue’s running themes of persistence and change.
12 My translations throughout.
13 The construction is a possessive dative; so ‘belong to’ vel sim. I just give ‘for’.
14 If we grant from the argument at 283e–4e that any logos is of something that is, then here the converse is claimed: that every thing that is has a corresponding logos. The argument then works by narrowing the scope of that claim by insisting that the relation between each of the things that are and some logos is exclusive and exhaustive: this is the exactness stipulation.
15 I do not here offer a detailed account of where we might say things go wrong here; one obvious problem is the shift between 1 & 2, and between 3 & 4 (between logoi of what is not, and logoi of things as they are not). See here Denyer [Citation1991]. The Sophist, of course, concerns itself with these issues, perhaps anticipated in the Euthydemus. But time and space preclude more on this here. I have discussed it elsewhere, e.g., McCabe [Citation1994, Citation2000].
16 The construction changes here to the possessive genitive, suggesting an ever-narrowing scope for the relation between a thing, a pragma, and a saying, a logos. Again, there is more to be said here, not least about how one should understand the intentionality of a logos. In what follows I avoid the vagaries of ‘aboutness’ by simply translating the genitive of pragmatos as the relation between a logos and the thing it is of, and taking this relation to exhaust, for the sophists’ purposes, the relation of aboutness. It is notable, I think, just how the argument demands a richly contextual theory from the person who would rebut it.
17 Pragma: this word has already been the focus of attention in the first Socratic episode, where Socrates discussed how we might ‘fare well’, eu prattein (278e3 ff.) That discussion turned on the contrast between faring well as amassing good things, (pragmata), and faring well as having the right state of soul (prattein as a general state or activity or actualisation). The things we do are, on the account that Socrates suggests, merely incidents in a life well lived: so here faring or doing well is, one might say, metaphysically prior to acts done well.
18 NB 285e6; it is a notable feature of this dialogue that the arguments turn out to apply to what is going on in the frame dialogue; at the same time, the frame dialogue interrupts the arguments, notably at 290e.
19 For interesting discussion, see Denyer [Citation1991].
20 Because it comes in bite-sized chunks … Non-Anglophone readers will, I hope, forgive the pun: sophists are often known as ‘logic-choppers’; and I take them to offer a feast of ‘chopped logic’
21 The disaggregation of a logos is the main strand in the Sophist’s defence of the possibility of falsehood: 251e ff. The Sophist restricts its solution to the problem of falsehood to an account of the structure of individual logoi, and shows how any logos can succeed in being about something, while failing to state what is true of what it is about (so the Sophist resists the thought that these sophists press, that any logos is somehow atomistic). The Sophist does not, however, engage (in ways that the discussion of falsehood in the Theaetetus does) with the role of the speaker in falsehood, or with how we might understand, as I take the Euthydemus to suggest, what the project of legein might be.
22 How far does chopped logos countenance truths that may be unexpressed, pragmata that no-one mentions? The discussion of countersaying allows for this possibility; and the argument to deny falsehoods is not falsified by unexpressed truths. However, the project here is not whether truth can be exhausted (more truths will not contribute to the possibility of falsehood), but rather whether it can be missed.
23 Consider the so-called tautology: Not {p & ∼p}. On standard assumptions about truth-functionality, the truth of p determines the falsity of ∼p, or vice versa. But suppose chopped logos holds: if p is a chopped logos, then ∼p is either a chopped logos and so true, or meaningless. The same observation applies to other truth-functional relations: if anything said is true, there is no scope for falsification at the level of logical structure: first-order truth-functional relations (conjunction, material conditional etc.) do not apply.
24 Such as the relation between one logos and another which falls within its scope. Suppose I say ‘p’. If p is a chopped logos, it is true. Now suppose I say, ‘I say that p is true’. If this too is a chopped logos, it is true. But what happens if I say, ‘I deny that p is true’? Either that is true, and p is false; or p is true and what I say is false. But not so, on chopped logos. The sophistic argument blocks, or precludes, higher-order relations between logoi. I have discussed this and related issues further in McCabe [Citation2000].
25 But see Socrates’ remark at 303d1 about the sophists’ always talking to those like themselves.
26 Killing Cleinias turns on a denial of change and aspect in the object of a logos; and this is immediately converted into discussion of the logos itself at 283e9. The structure of the second sophistic episode as a whole brings into focus the question of change and process in the object of a logos and the differences of aspect and tense in the logos as stated.
27 Consider the dialectical situation described by Aristotle in Metaphysics IV; I have argued that Plato too is interested in the question of the defence of basic principle in the Theaetetus, Sophist and Philebus [McCabe Citation2000].
28 Aristotle tried to deal with the standoff by saying that someone who takes a position like this, utterly inimical to dialectic, is either a vegetable or they are refuted out of their own mouths; Metaphysics 1006a1–15. Aristotle got the idea from Socrates, who here says just that: the sophists, he insists with increasing desperation as the dialogue wears on, sew up their own mouths: 303d.
29 See above, n. 7, on whether these logoi even belong to the sophists or whether they are committed, in the dialectic of the dialogue, to any theory at all. Compare Euthydemus 296d–297a where the two brothers start to squabble, as a consequence of Dionysodorus’ apparently committing himself to something in particular.
30 ‘It always seems to me to me to be an astonishing logos, which both overturns others and itself.’ (286c4)
31 ‘This logos both stays in the same place and yet, as in the old saw, throwing another it falls.’ (288a3–4).
32 ‘And your logoi have this other, public-spirited and gentle side: whenever you say that no thing is fine or good or white or anything else like that, nor, in short, that anything is different from anything else, you actually sew up men's mouths as you speak; but the fact that you seem not only to do this to others, but also to sew up your own mouths, this is a charming feature, and robs your logoi of their hostility.’ 303d5–e4.
33 His ethical spin on the matter doesn’t seem to help: he says that if whatever logoi you are committed to are disgraceful, you had better be ashamed. What does shame (you might well ask) have to do with logic? More below.
34 See here, e.g., Sprague [Citation1962] and Chance [Citation1992]. We find the same in Aristotle’s rerun of some of the arguments of the Euthydemus, in Sophistici Elenchi from 165b25 ff.
35 Amathês is usually translated ‘ignorant’: but amathês is importantly cognate with manthanein, so literally ‘not-learned’, ‘unlearned’.
36 Prodicus advanced a realist argument for the impossibility of falsehood, in contrast to the relativist argument attributed to Protagoras by Socrates in the Theaetetus: compare the evidence from Didymus the Blind (Commentary on Ecclesiastes I. 8b). That Socrates also speaks of ‘those around Protagoras’, 286d, should not make us confuse realism and relativism here.
37 Is it that a grasp of the meaning of meaning would allow Plato to contrast sense and reference? Would that help later in this dialogue? Does it matter? Why?
38 The contrast is obscured, notice, in the past tense in English: ‘I learned’ can be both imperfective and perfective: ‘I learned the piano when I was a child’. I acknowledge a debt here: this aspect-reading of the verbs here was first suggested to me by a remark made by David Sedley in a seminar some 30 years ago.
39 Instead, we may kill Cleinias.
40 Compare and contrast the sophists’ treatment of this at 293 ff.
41 There are many different models for the metaphysics of this: there might be degrees of learning or stages of learning or just a gradual process of getting better at something.
42 Notice, for example, the shift from the request to the sophists that they should turn young Cleinias to wisdom, so to give him some protreptic to knowledge, where the object of the protreptic is distinct from it, 274c; and Socrates’ own characterization of philosophy as itself protreptic wisdom, 278c–d.
43 I have discussed this elsewhere (see McCabe [Citation2015: chs 12 and 13]); however we take Socrates’ discussion at 280–1, he at least concludes that wisdom is good itself by itself.
44 Some part of the Socratic enterprise is to distinguish between the ways in which some models of knowledge may fall short of the virtue of wisdom; this for another time.
45 Is the protreptic to philosophy understood as the means to an end but excluded from it, or as somehow or other continuous with the end (so inclusive)? Is wanting to acquire the end of wisdom distinct from the acquiring, or is the protreptic itself part and parcel of the learning? If I am right about what Socrates says about the aspects of learning here, we should prefer the inclusive version of protreptic.
46 Compare and contrast, however what Socrates says about the correctness of names, hê orthotês onomatôn, and the correctness of things, hê orthotês pragmatôn, at 277–8.
47 See the literature on this discussed recently in Jones [Citation2013]; McCabe [Citation2015: ch 12] and Bobonich [Citation2002].
48 Consider, for example, Socrates’ advice to Cleinias at 275d–e; his interest in past agreements at 280b or 297b; his interest in how the protreptic logos (nb 283b2) might be tackled, both by himself (278d–e) and by the sophists (283a). That this assumption is shared by others is brought out by Ctesippus’ anger at being traduced by the argument that he wishes Cleinias dead (283e).
49 The nominal equivalent is peri +genitive; this is not a claim about the intentionality of the logos but about its object in these raw terms.
50 prattein cognate with pragma, and poiein, which expects there to be a product, 284b6–c2.
51 Witness the use of the same vocabulary in the frame dialogue, where Ctesippus ‘says the same’ (agrees) hômologêsen, e.g., 284c2
52 This extended kind of saying is picked up here: e.g., ‘saying the same’ 284c4, taken as a perfective, hence ‘decisively agree’; or ‘according to your saying’, 284c5, a logos as the (spoken) grounds for something else which is said or agreed.
53 This focus on the person explains the way in which the central sophistic episode about truth is bracketed by two Socratic discussions of virtue and wisdom; the episodes are continuous, if they are understood as an extended discussion of the notion of truth-directedness.
54 Hence, they are new-fangled, kainoi, 271b.