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Acknowledgments
As well as expressing my gratitude to my commentators, I would like also to thank Fiona Leigh, Tim Clarke and Hugh Benson, who made this discussion happen and who provided brilliant comments, criticisms and amplifications along the way; and Mark Textor, Nils Kürbis, Matt Duncombe, Saloni de Souza, Daniel Vazquez and Dom Bailey for further comments as I was writing this response.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Compare, e.g., Vlastos [Citation1991: 57] on the ‘ontological commitment’ of the (elenctic) Socrates when he questions Euthyphro, in assuming his conditions can be met.
2 For an extreme example, we have only to look at the responses of Aristotle in the second half of the Parmenides and notice how the sequence is usually taken as arguments belonging to the fictional character ‘Parmenides’ or else to Plato himself. Compare, e.g., Owen [Citation1986: 86].
3 The identification of the Anonymous as Isocrates is deliberately vague, I think, in order to get the reader to be forced to make a careful comparison; hence ‘the Anonymous [Isocrates]’; see here McCabe [Citation2013], Leyh [Citation2021], and de Souza and Vazquez [Citation2021] (I apologise for repeated references to other things I have written in these comments; it is poor form, I fear, but has helped to make what I say a little more concise than it would otherwise have been).
4 E.g., why should I think that any of this is Socrates’ Problem?
5 This is a delicate balance, of course, in cases where there are commitments that seem to be implied by the very asking of the question; this, I am suggesting, is the balance that Plato offers his readers as a challenge.
6 The interest in the third sophistic episode in PNCs governing (something like) predicates is distinct from the questions raised about the process of disagreeing with one’s interlocutor. It is partly for this reason that I eschew ‘contradict’ for antilegein; I also seek to retain in English the word-play I claim turns up in Plato’s Greek: hence countersaying, still (contra Jones and Sharma [Citation2021], who object that ‘countersaying’ is not proper English; I concede that it is extremely rare, v. O.E.D. ad loc., but hope that the unexpected expression serves to call attention to the focus on ‘saying’ in this text).
7 One of the oddities of the Alcibiades is its apparent convenience: it often offers explicit commitments to theses that we might not find directly attested elsewhere (but on this see Denyer [Citation2001: 16]). I am very grateful to Ellisif Wasmuth and Pauliina Remes for making me think much more carefully about the Alcibiades.
8 My thanks to Tim Clarke for pointing out that Aristotle speaks of the process of ‘demonstration by refutation’ of fundamental principles in terms of the responsibility of the respondent (Metaphysics 1006a17–18, 25–6). For a different occasion is the reflection on Aristotle’s significant engagement with the Euthydemus in these chapters of the Metaphysics.
9 This may in part address the question raised by Anderson [Citation2021] about speech acts, see below: the scope of speech acts (understood in the contemporary mode) may be wider than the scope of saying.
10 If this is right, it helps to confirm the point of the elaborate moments when one of the brothers does something wrong, by answering a question in a determinate way, e.g., at 297a.
11 Jones and Sharma [Citation2021] contest the unity of this collection of arguments; I respond below.
12 My thanks to Saloni de Souza and Daniel Vazquez [Citation2021] for pressing me on this.
13 Jones and Sharma’s [Citation2021] rejection of my expression ‘countersaying’ on the grounds that it is not proper English (see above n. 6) does not take my wider point about ‘saying’ in general, I presume because they think that the sophistic project is a mess from the start. I beg to differ: there is only Plato’s project here, and it is this that I seek to explore.
14 The use of ‘doctrinal’ ups the ante, of course: it is hard to think that Ctesippus has doctrines, but much easier to think that he has something that might be thought of as commitments.
15 Even Aristotle regards some of the arguments he records as designed to entrap: Soph. El. 169b27 ff. and compare 171b25 ff.
16 Compare, e.g., Whiting’s [Citation2012] marvellous meditation on the Philebus and the Eudemian Ethics.
17 Compare, for different passages, McCabe [Citation2006, Citation2009].
18 If antilegein is translated ‘contradict’, these plays on words, often illuminating in Plato, are lost in ordinary English: hence my attempt to maintain a ‘saying’ element in ‘countersaying’. Jones and Sharma [Citation2021] seem not to have noticed the central point of my paper, about the aspects of ‘saying’.
19 In reading the dialogues we need to avoid the equivalent of the pathetic fallacy, in imagining we have access to the inner life of fictional characters.
20 That we need to think of the rhetorical effect here, rather than the strict implication of what is said, is reinforced, I think, by the fact that plausibility is person-relative; and the person in question here is Ctesippus, who is a fictional character, his representation determined by the rhetorical effects of the piece.
21 Compare, e.g., Republic 353b where the same locution (is + dative) indicates the way that virtue is distributed according to the function of each thing; it does not imply that every individual does in fact have virtue.
22 See, e.g., the contrast between ‘all’ and ‘each’ at Euthyd. 280c; or the clearly distributive use at 301a.
23 This may just be a matter of emphasis, a focus on ‘one by one’ rather than ‘every’ or ‘all’, and not contradict the suggestion that there are logoi for everything. But it may equally—as Republic 353b may suggest, be a modal claim: in general, virtue turns up, if it turns up, where there is a function; likewise, in general, logoi turn up, if they turn up, where there are things that are. Gifford [Citation1905] ad loc. clearly takes the point to be an Antisthenean one about definitions and associates the claim with a point at Laws 895e about definitions. But that need not be the point at all here, but rather a straightforward claim about saying. Hawtrey [Citation1981] ad loc., too claims that there is ‘little doubt of’ the Antisthenean background.
24 This is the point, then, of the discussion of to pragma at 286a–b; see below n.26.
25 Jones and Sharma [Citation2021: 169] take Ctesippus to be fighting the sophists at every turn of the first argument, ‘without ever conceding defeat’. The arguments are, of course, as much studded with his agreement as by his resistance.
26 There is a further question whether the argument to show the impossibility of countersaying is complete. I take there to be four cases, all about some putative thing (‘the thing’, to pragma). They are carefully arranged. In the first case we both say the logos of the thing (and so we say the same, 286a5). In the second case, neither of us says the logos of the thing, and so we do not countersay, 286b1. So the first two cases are pairwise, where what each party does is symmetrical. In the third case, I say the logos of the thing, and you say another logos of another thing, and so we do not countersay (286b4). In the fourth case, I say (the logos of) the thing and you say nothing at all (286b5). The final question, as I understand it, offers us a case of ‘not saying’: hence the repetition of ‘you are not saying at all’ in ‘the person not saying’, b5–6. My translation ‘Or I say the thing and you don’t say [speak] at all’ is designed to capture the fourth possibility. Then ê at b5 introduces a fourth case, in contrast with the case of the third (compare perhaps 279a): the alternates hold fixed that I say the logos of the thing and give the two possibilities here envisaged: you either say something [else, as opposed to the case envisaged in the first two cases] or you say nothing. The second two possibilities, thus, are pairwise too. I take the failure to repeat the temporal hotan merely to convey the vividness of the last case, picking up as it does the fact that Ctesippus is now silent. I have profited here from a lengthy and agreeable disagreement with John Ferrari. Hawtrey [Citation1981] ad loc. takes there to be three cases, as do Jones and Sharma [Citation2021], but for Hawtrey the third case is apparently what is expressed in the final clause: where the putative countersayer says nothing at all.
27 Thus, for example, the hyperbolical doubt of Descartes and the epistemology of the modern era.
28 Compare the significance of the relative clauses at 283d2–3 and at 284a1–4.
29 The opening frame introduces a complicated double discussion of yesterday and today (notable at the interruption at 290e). The descriptions of the protagonists—the sophists are ‘new-fangled’ (271b9) while Socrates is an old man (272c5) with a long memory (287b)—are especially focussed on their temporal features. The discussion of the protreptic to wisdom addresses the question of process and time; and that is further reflected upon in some of the later arguments, e.g., the omniscience arguments and their interest in ‘always’, 296a ff. See McCabe [Citation1993].
30 Marsyas, e.g., at 285d.
31 E.g., the relation between saying and hearing is puzzling from the start, posed in terms both of an ongoing dialogue which Crito cannot hear from his position on the outside, and in terms of Crito’s failure to hear; and the introduction of the sophists is strikingly in terms of their completed changes in terms of profession, 272a–b.
32 The ‘secret doctrine’ is best understood as a claim about no persistence rather than as a direct claim about flux: McCabe [Citation2000: ch. 2]. As in the Euthydemus, the order of the refutations in the Theaetetus suggests that Plato here treats the metaphysical claim about change as distinct from the epistemological or logical claim about truth, and as requiring separate refutation. This is despite what appears to be an equivalence claim at 160d.
33 There may be some kind of ‘compare and contrast’ in the reference to Protagoras at 286c. Intertextuality is a particular feature of the Euthydemus, see McCabe [Citation2009].
34 But see Schofield [Citation1972] on where this stretch of text belongs.
35 As I persist in believing, see McCabe [Citation1986].
36 One might add that the Philebus too focusses on the possibility of falsehood—the possibility of false pleasure—within a dialogue which pays considerable attention to the difficulty of dialectic with someone who denies the value of continuous thought: see McCabe [Citation2000: 128ff].
37 Hence the omniscience arguments, see Duncombe [Citation2021] and McCabe [Citation2009].
38 Does the point exhaust all possible speech acts? Anderson’s acute comments help here, and more below—if the Alcibiades point is taken, then there may be other kinds of speech act (questions, for example) which do not have these conditions.
39 Here Meno’s paradox is important, repeatedly: see, e.g., Fine [Citation1992], Scott [Citation1995], McCabe [Citation2009].
40 E.g., that progress is made from what is not known to what is known, 276a8; that progress is made from what is known to what is known, 276c5; that what is known is grounded in what is known, 277b1; that what is known is not grounded in what is known, 277c.
41 Protreptic towards philosophy, 275a1; protreptic wisdom, 278c5; protreptic towards wisdom, 278d3; protreptic saying, 282d5. This shifting terminology associated with the turning towards wisdom (protreptic) is, I believe, provocative, once we attend to the problematic nature of the process involved.
42 In this, I believe, the model of knowledge offered by the Euthydemus is not quite captured by the analogy with crafts, despite Anderson’s suggestion, this volume, and the regularity of the analogy with crafts in the Aristotelian material. A craft’s completion is not always explained by some product, but perhaps also by some performance (on which see also Thomas’s excellent discussion, this volume); on the model of knowledge offered here, I think that we are asked to think of it much more as a state than as a capacity to perform or to act, whose presence affects the value of everything else. Now is not the place to revisit the arguments of 278–81, but it is my view that there, and in the later Socratic episode, the dialectical strategy is to undermine the craft analogy, not to support it; McCabe (Citation2002).
43 How does the metaphor of the grain of knowledge work? For Duncombe’s purposes, I think it is designed to show how some property of a person may be properly correlated to a set of objects. In the case of fine-grained knowledgeability, there is a feature of the property of the subject that allows it only to relate to a single thing; in the case of coarse-grained knowledgeability, the property of the subject somehow relates both to the collection of epistemic objects and to the way they are interrelated (their ‘grain’).
44 The use of this distinction to resolve the omniscience arguments may perhaps mask an unclarity in the idiom of ‘grain’. If coarse-grained knowledge helps us to understand the subject’s (relational) property of being knowledgeable as maximal, does that mean it is fully articulated, including all the possible objects of knowledge properly arranged and aligned (so, three-dimensional in the way that the grain is)? Or does it mean that the coarse-grained knowledge is merely generic: wide in scope, but indefinite in its content and structure (so, perhaps, coarse rather than fine, picking up the evaluative content of the ‘grain’ idiom)? I am not sure that Duncombe quite commits himself. However, in what follows I commit myself, to the thought that the coarse-grained knowledge is properly grained, so fully articulated and aligned; and I leave on one side my uneasiness about the ‘coarse’ evaluation.
45 The question of aspect may be complex: the relation between the knower and a fine-grained piece of knowledge may be all or nothing (she either knows it or not); so perfective (see above on knowing that p). The relation between a knower and maximal coarse-grained knowledge, in the other hand, may be imperfect if it is so maximal as to be impossible to achieve (we are always trying). However, in what follows I take the relation to be the other way about: a fine-grained piece of knowledge is incomplete just because it stands alone, whereas the coarse-grained correlate is, either for a domain or tout court, complete. Progress in learning, towards wisdom or knowledgeability, is towards the coarse-grained, with the fine-grained item either standing for a step along the way or for a consequence of the possession of knowledge in the perfective sense. The perfective account, on the view I endorse, describes a state of the subject; and so it cannot be limited to a single epistemic item (however we might determine such an item to be individuated).
46 There is a huge literature to which this may, I think, the beginning of a response: some interpretations of Platonic epistemology press the thought that the property of the subject is explained exactly by the objects (so the relation is, as it were, one in which the subject is passive). Instead, Plato’s arguments— in the Republic, for example—are better explained if the relation in question is one which there is a two-way dependency between subject and object: something like, for example, response-dependency (see McCabe [Citation2016]: I have learned a great deal here, as ever, from my discussions with Verity Harte, both where we agree and where we do not). I think this allows us to see that there is something rich to be said about both the property of the subject and the scope of the objects, considered together.
47 I discuss further below the question whether this is a case of ambiguity or of something that is metaphysically more complex, especially in the context of aspect-change and teleology.
48 I have discussed these arguments in more detail in McCabe [Citation2009].
49 I am here ignoring the evaluative features of the contrast which tend to suggest that fine-grained knowledge is somehow better than its coarse correlate.
50 There are occasions where Duncombe [Citation2021] suggests that the coarse-grained version is not just maximal, but also vague; in following his image of grain I have not followed that thought.
51 See, e.g., McCabe [Citation2000, Citation2009, Citation2015: chs 1, 11].
52 More here in Anderson [Citation2021] and Thomas [Citation2021].
53 Duncombe [Citation2021] prefers the fine- to coarse- account, I think; but he is happy that the argument is equivocated, so is not hampered by this objection.
54 See McCabe [Citation2009] on the express echoes of Meno’s paradox in the Omniscience argument.
55 Compare the turns of the second Socratic episode, e.g., at 290c and 292d.
56 E.g., in the opening frame where the language switches from talk of the sophists, e.g., at 275c on the sheer size of their wisdom, compared to their characterisation as ‘all-wise’ at 271c6.
57 There is a persistent issue here about whether knowledge must then be a craft or skill, or whether it is not like a skill but has features that might be thought peculiar to virtues. This is not the place to discuss this at length; but I note that both Anderson [Citation2021] and Thomas [Citation2021] think that the analogy with skills is a way to understand the teleology of knowledge. The transformative good of Euthydemus 281e is not quite so tractable, I think; see McCabe [Citation2002].
58 Of course, there are exceptions (lying, confabulating, imitating and so forth), but the exceptions are just what show up the criterial nature of truth for saying. Consider, for example, the ways in which Plato uses the kind of activity that fails to be truth-directed as somehow impediments to our proper understanding: e.g., in Republic 2–3. But these exceptions do not show, I think, that when we think of the ‘aim’ of saying that truth needs to be its explicit end.
59 My thanks to Nils Kurbis for pointing me to Davidson’s Principle of Charity which brings out the way that truth works between speakers:
[Interpretation] is accomplished by assigning truth conditions to alien sentences that make the native speakers right when plausibly possible, according, of course, to our own view of what is right. […] disagreement and agreement alike are intelligible only against a background of massive agreement [Davidson Citation1973: 137].
60 Anderson’s [Citation2021] splendid commentary has been really useful in helping me to clarify this issue: I hope I have succeeded!
61 This restriction, I think, makes uttering ‘ouch!’ not saying at all, but ouching.
62 See above on the Alcibiades, and n. 10.
63 Expands rather than equivocates, I think.
64 The idea that truth is coarse allows for truth-functionality to be a feature of arguments, rather than simply a relation between statements. This may seem counter-intuitive because our conception of truth is often proposition by proposition; but in the context of the Euthydemus the notion that truth might be a property of some collection of propositions, truth-functionally related, would be one way of defending truth-functionality against chopped logos. If the central notion here is the correlation of truth with saying, there is no reason why saying should be carved up proposition by proposition rather than in other ways, such as speaker by speaker, or speech by speech. My thanks to Hugh Benson for pressing this point.
65 This is perhaps being exposed in the ‘Bravo Heracles’ argument at 303a.
66 It need not be the only endeavour in town: see de Souza and Vazquez [Citation2021], even the sophists have an endeavour; and see Leyh [Citation2021], so does Isocrates. See below: it is, I think, a feature of the rich dramatis personae of the dialogue that we are shown many endeavours, not all of them orientated towards knowledge.
67 E.g., Republic 531e, 534b–535a.
68 To many this is what makes this kind of process craft-like: Anderson [Citation2021] and Thomas [Citation2021]. In what follows I suggest that the focus is rather on what one might think of as the naturalism of the process; and this is what makes it look, I think, more like a developing virtue than a craft in the course of being learned. This kind of naturalist teleology appears, I have argued at McCabe [Citation2016], in the epistemology of the Republic.
69 Are these ‘internal’ ends [Thomas Citation2021: 197] what mark out production from performance?
70 Thomas [Citationibid.: 195] suggests that Socrates’ apparent concession that he would be happy to be replaced, so long as he became wise, is in fact acceptable. In my view the dialogue issues the question of whether it would be acceptable to challenge the metaphysics of replacement as opposed to a metaphysics of persistence: but further discussion of this is for another occasion.
71 See above n. 41.
72 The same for the parallel between seeing and knowing in the Republic: McCabe [Citation2016].
73 My thanks to Tim Clarke for making me qualify this claim. Imperfection does not entail failure, of course: a process may be incomplete but proceed without a hitch. And when there is a failure, it need not be productive of anything—the failures may occur unnoticed or without significance. Even if a failure is noticed, it may be merely productive of frustration or despair (or even shrugging the shoulders and walking away). However, sometimes failures are the impetus to succeed, next time around, or later on in a process. It is those cases of failure that I take to be an important feature of imperfection.
74 See Williams [Citation2002]. Compare and contrast Davidson’s [Citation1973] Principle of Charity, above n. 59. For Davidson, I think, this is a matter of epistemic expectation, where for Williams truthfulness is properly a virtue.
75 This requires taking the argument at 280–1 as a claim about the intrinsic value of virtue or wisdom: I have argued for this view at McCabe [Citation2002]. Thomas’ [Citation2021: 197] point about artistic performance is important here too: for the development and perfection of artistic skill is indeed something that we admire in its subject even without an ongoing performance; and perhaps too the same of other craftspeople. I still think, however, that it is at least possible to think of virtue that it is valuable in its mere existence in the subject whereas the value of art may require performance or production, at some point or even regularly. On that account, the value of art in the subject is derivative from, or dependent upon, the value of the product or performance. In the case of virtue, I take Socrates to suggest at 281, the dependency is the other way about: the value of the virtuous state is prior. There is a great deal more to be said here, on a different occasion.
76 See above n. 3.
77 As de Souza and Vazquez [Citation2021] observe.
78 I have much enjoyed thinking about this alternative. The characterisation of the Anonymous suggests that the issue here may be one of grounding; but to think about it like that—or so the pragmatist will say—simply begs the question.
79 I argue below that we should understand the project here as Platonic rather than Socratic: it is the project of the author, not one of his characters.
80 This is why, I think, the three versions of the self-refutations are different: two attack the arguments, the other the sophists as proponents of the arguments. However, what I say above shows that the last of these may be overstated, since the proponent of any theory or any argument here is not the person who asks the question, but the person who answers—so Cleinias, Ctesippus or Socrates himself.
81 Denyer [Citation2021: 153] ‘the trick was just a trick’.
82 Although for Plato, and I suspect for Aristotle too, this seeing is not at all a case of raw and unmediated perception: see McCabe [Citation2016].
83 E.g., the two sophists are kainoi, ‘new-fangled’ at 271c; the Anonymous is identified in vague ways; Socrates himself seems to display a kind of epistemic confidence (293c) that is unlike his famous avowals of ignorance, e.g., in the Apology.
84 Although if there is here treatment of the scope and role of speech acts, perhaps the latter provides it.
85 See Denyer [Citation2021], Anderson [Citation2021]. Thomas [Citation2021: 193–4] argues that a diagnosis of ambiguity is enough to break the arguments of the first sophistic episode; but agrees that this case of knowledge is a peculiar one, with built in continuity.