Doctrine Of Recollection And Meno's Paradox

I am going to argue that the Doctrine of Recollection resolves the Paradox that Meno poses to Socrates. The Meno’s paradox arises when Meno and Socrates are inquiring into what virtue is. It goes as follows, how will one know that they have correctly identified the object of their inquiry if they do not know the object they are inquiring about? On the other hand, if you know what you are inquiring about then you need not inquire, because you already know. Inquiry seems to be an impossibility or superfluous, because you either already know the thing you are inquiring about or don’t know the thing you are inquiring about and have no way of knowing whether or not you have “bumped right into it” (80d). “And how are you going to inquire about it …show more content…
He says that the soul is immortal and has been born many times. Since it has been born many times, it has already seen everything (the forms of the things), and having seen everything it has learned everything. “Since the soul is immortal, then, and has been born many times, and has seen both the things here and the ones in Hades-in fact, all things- there is nothing it has not learned. So it is in no way surprising that it can recollect about virtue and other things, since it knew them before.”(81d). Therefore the process of inquiry is the process of recollection, because at one point your soul came to know it. In other words it is the process of directing your soul to what it has seen and known before, in order to know it again. This means that people don’t actually teach and learn in the way that they think they do, rather they help each other to remember what they already knew. In this way, inquiry is made possible. It becomes possible to know that you have correctly identified the thing (virtue in the case of the Meno), because the process of remembering acts as verification. An example of the Doctrine of Recollection in action is walking into a room having forgotten what you are looking for, but remembering what it was, once you see it. At one point in time you knew exactly what you were looking for, but lost your train of thought and could not remember. You continue looking for the item, unsure of what it is, until seeing the item jogs your memory and you remember, that was the item you were searching for. Socrates also gives an example of the Doctrine of Recollection in dialogue with Meno when they bring over a slave boy to inquire with. When Socrates first begins to question the boy about Geometry the boy cannot answer Socrates’ questions. Then after Socrates poses some questions, the boy can answer Socrates’ questions correctly. Now given that all Socrates