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Meno's Paradox
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
Hintikka has said this about questions: ‘The questioner asks his listener to supply a certain item of information, to make him know a certain thing’.1 Now this certainly seems to capture our intuitions about one kind of enquiry, a kind which I call market-place enquiry. That is, it seems to capture the speaker's aims when, in typical situations, he addresses a question to another person. But there are many uses of interrogative sentences, even some questioning uses, which Hintikka's account will not fit. It will not fit so-called rhetorical questions nor, in a perfectly straight way, the questions with which quizzing schoolteachers seek to discover what their pupils know and do not know. Above all, it will not fit those questions with which philosophers and others are wont to preface their solitary enquiries. I call these Cartesian enquiries after their most devoted practitioner; but it should be noted that Cartesian enquiries, as I understand them, may be quite mundane. I shall be engaged in one if, alone in my house, I wonder whether the post has come and go and look. Because there is no one to ask I have to find out on my own. Contrariwise, market-place enquiries, although they are often mundane may be momentous.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1986
References
1 Jaakko, Hintikka, ‘Questions about Questions’, in Semantics and Philosophy, Munitz, Milton K. and Unger, Peter K. (eds) (New York University Press, 1974), 104.Google Scholar
2 All translations from the Greek are my own.
3 Nicholas, White has vigorously rejected this suggestion. Cf. ‘Inquiry’, Review of Metaphysics 28 (1974), 290.Google Scholar
4 I introduced the notion of commonability in ‘Knowing and Believing’, Philosophy 55 (1980), 320. Cf. also, ‘The Community of Knowledge’, The Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1981), esp. 302–304.
5 But it is required that he believes me. This radically distinguishes my position from Zeno Vendler's. See my ‘The Transmission of Knowledge’, The Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1979) passim, and Zeno, Vendler, ‘Telling the Facts’, in Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language, French, Peter A., Uehling, Theodore E. and Wettstein, Howard K. (eds) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 231.Google Scholar
6 Nicholas White, op. cit., 293–294.
7 Loc. cit. Some of White's positions in this article are slightly modified in Nicholas, White, Plato on Knowledge and Reality (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976), but this one survives with a less stark rationale; cf. 37.Google Scholar
8 Throughout, the word I translate as ‘seek’ is ‘zētein’.
9 Julius, Moravcsik, ‘Learning and Recollection’, in Plato I: Metaphysics and Epistemology, Vlastos, G. (ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1972), 57Google Scholar
10 Especially in ‘Inquiry’.