Dissatisfactory In Socrates

"I wonder whether you can tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is teachable or, if not teachable, at least a product of habituation" (70A). These opening lines center the dialogue around Meno's paradox and the doctrine of recollection, presented by Socrates. Meno believes that an understanding of virtue can come to be understood or reached by exploring examples of virtue. This answer, as to whether virtue is teachable, or as to what the essence of virtue is, is dissatisfactory to Socrates. In the eyes of Socrates, the essence of virtue provides the foundation of the veracity for examples of virtue given by Meno; for him, though, there is one universal concept of virtue. These competing ideals, one of exploring virtue by example and another by its essence, strike at the core of the paradox and the doctrine …show more content…
No. If passages 82B-85B are re-read with the assumption that Socrates does not know the answer ahead of time, and there appears to be no place in which the argument becomes to depend on the teacher knowing the answer, then the doctrine of recollection is still true and valid.

Another potential problem is if the information was not known in the beginning and was known at the end of the argument, but was always recognized as true by the soul, because knowledge is immortal if the soul is immortal, then was it not already known at the beginning of the argument, or rather that the potential was always there and that the false knowledge should have been rejected sooner?

This quandary leads to a few different interpretations of the doctrine of recollection: that all information is already in the soul and can be retrieved, or there are some concepts that are innate and raw experience confronts these innate qualities, or we are born with the ability to reason and can derive the logical possibilities of our