Before Socrates can get started with a new approach to the question, Meno raises a fundamental problem: how is inquiry even possible? If, on the one hand, you don’t know what the answer is, how will you recognize the right answer when it presents itself? If, on the other hand, you already know the answer, why do you have to look for it? This is a kind of philosophical puzzle, a dilemma with two equally untenable options. It is known as the Paradox of Inquiry.
Socrates responds, not with a philosophical analysis, but with a religious tradition. Some religious leaders and poets say that the soul is immortal, and it is reborn into different bodies over time, but it never perishes. If that is so, it has already learned many things. In that case, learning is recollection, not discovering something one has never known.
To illustrate, Socrates asks Meno to call up one of his servants in the entourage that follows him around. He summons a slave boy who speaks Greek but has no formal education, and in particular no knowledge of mathematics. Socrates draws a square in the dust on the ground, and draws lines inside it making it into four equal squares, each (approximately) one foot square, with the large square being four square feet in area. He now asks the boy to double the size of the large square. The boy answers, we need to double the size of the sides of the square. But when the sides of the large square are doubled, they are four feet long, and the resulting square is sixteen square feet in area, not eight.
Socrates now suggests drawing diagonal lines from the corners of the original square, which will intersect to make a larger square. It turns out that this square is eight square feet in area, twice the area of the original square.
Socrates reviews his little “experiment” in learning through recollection. He points out that when Socrates asked the boy how to double the square, he answered confidently—but wrongly. “So have we harmed him by shocking him and confusing him like the stingray?”[8] Not at all. “Previously he thought he could give good speeches to large crowds at will concerning how to double the area of a square by doubling the side!” says Socrates. He is echoing Meno’s claim that before he met Socrates, he could give speeches to large crowds about virtue.[9]
But would he have been able to give the right answer if he had not been shown that his previous opinion was false? So did we not help him by shocking him?
And did he give any answers that did not express his own opinions? And didn’t he have the true opinion somewhere in his own mind? So if we ask the right questions, “although no one is teaching him, but only asking questions,” Socrates continues, “he will come to know, recovering knowledge from himself? … And is not recovering knowledge from yourself what we mean by recollection?”[10]
Of course, Socrates’ questions were leading questions, and we might wonder to what degree his procedure will plant the answers in an interlocutor’s mind. But nonetheless, there is a major difference in approach between lecturing and imparting information, on the one hand, and inquiring what a person thinks, on the other. And the method Socrates is recommending here involves not just eliciting opinions, but exposing misunderstandings in one’s student, or rather one’s partner in the discovery or recovery of knowledge. A certain amount of failure might provide a strong incentive to the learner to get things right.
At this point we seem to have at least the beginnings of an answer to the paradox of inquiry: when we inquire, we may already be in some sense aware of the answer to our question, so that we are neither completely in the dark nor completely cognizant of that answer. There may be a middle ground between ignorance and understanding. Socrates says that he will not insist on every detail of his nascent account of knowledge, but he is convinced that we will be better, braver, and less idle if we believe knowledge of the unknown is attainable than if we think it is unattainable and the effort to discover truth is futile.[11] Plato’s pragmatic argument for inquiry has been borne out by the history of knowledge.
[8] Plato Meno 84b.
[9] Plato Meno 80b.
[10] Plato Meno 85d.
[11] Plato Meno 86b-c.