Socrates’ Examined Life
antigonejournal.com
antigonejournal.com
Its interesting to note that Aristotle was considered the practico-scientific thinker of antiquity into the middle ages in both the Christian and Muslim worlds (he is referred to as The Master, and The Philosopher endlessly), with Plato only making a comeback near the end of the renaissance IIRC and his import prior largely being in theology (again, in both the Judaeo-Christian and Muslim worlds).
I think this emphasis on precise definitions is actually not that helpful.
Humans don't really learn from abstract definitions so much as from seeing a bunch of examples of what is and what is not something. We ran into the same issue with ML and trying to do image recognition. Turned out that trying to define precisely what a "car" and using that to recognize a car is much less helpful than training with a lot of examples of what is and what is not a car.
Although not precisely like an ML neural net, our brains are enough like one that that this is likely to be similar as well.
I think that the guy the Socrates is examining is actually doing a better job of having someone learn what courage is by giving examples than Socrates is by trying to state a precise definition for it.
As an aside, you see the same thing with "monads". There are a ton of articles trying to define a monad. However, a much better example is to take the student through the problem and then through a lot of patterns and show them the various patterns of monads.
The definition comes later. When people learn math concepts, the definition is in fact often of surprisingly little value. They need to see examples, make examples, play around with instances and applications of the “thing”, to gain intuition and finally come back to the definition.
The abstract definition is also often (usually? always?) something that the person who came up with it also only came up with after finding the abstraction of otherwise concrete things they were working with.
Try understanding Fourier transforms, or worse, Laplace, from their definition alone. Unless you have an idea of what’s happening already, it’s extremely hard. Work with the concept for a while, and the definition appears laughably simple!
Once you did that, look up the definition of a Hilbert transform. What is that?! But in practice, it’s just “multiply all complex frequencies by j” or, much more intuitively: “rotate all phasors by 90°… i.e. put them on their side”. Unlike with the previous example, you might happily work with this one and use it a lot, and still be mystified by its definition.
And, yes, I only finally understood and later fully embraced Monads by “just using them” for a while. Now the concept is clear and they are everywhere. Use them even more, and you run into situations where Monads are not enough in practice. And now you’ve made the first step towards Arrows!
Both are important, practical examples but also the abstract definition (if one exists to a good approximation).
Luckily I can't remember encountering that didactic approach in math or language learning, but I'm not surprised at all if it exists and is somewhat widespread.
The best I can say for it is that it shows the way people think they have definitions of things, but they don't. Push on pretty much any nontrivial definition and it will fail. That observation, at least, is kind of interesting, in that it shows the limits of the way we think about stuff.
But we do think about stuff, and both bio and silicon neural nets do a pretty good, messy job of it. If Socrates had pushed harder on that, he might have gotten some real work done about the nature of thought. Instead, he always just struck me as being kind of a jerk, rather than contributing anything.
Humans believe they know what the human definition of cat is, but that doesn't mean there's a definitive ideal definition of cat that humans have privileged access to.
Some cats - like Schrodinger's Cat, and this cat - aren't cats at all. They're rhetorical devices about cats.
Which is convenient, because they don't need food or a litter box. (Although they can be messy in other ways.)
The point being that even a supposedly simple concept like "cat" is much more than the sum of some nominal properties and actions which are easy to enumerate. ("Has four legs, purrs.")
Both the ML and human "definition" of cat - which is more like an open list of weighted cat-related experiences - is much closer to defining what a cat is than the intersection of all the properties that supposedly define a cat completely.
In other words Plato was absolutely wrong. There are no Platonic ideal forms. (Even if there were - where would they live?)
There are only probability density fields in qualia space. And when there's enough qualia density in one location you can start to suspect that you're interacting with a cat/chair/philosopher/ML researcher/whatever, and then draw on your behavioural model of each object to predict what will happen as you continue to interact with it.
It’s a very different reply than you might expect to get from, say, a Sioux warrior, or a European knight, or a samurai, etc. Or from the Greeks themselves, outside of this fairly narrow band of history!
Consider this: the soldier being willing to defend against an enemy when he doesn't fear death isn't necessarily displaying courage. This particular soldier could have a death wish for all we know.
If I posed this scenario, then maybe you'd dive a little deeper and say something like "Most people are afraid to die, so if you were a soldier that didn't want to die, and you choose to defend your post when confronted by an enemy that can kill you, that would make you courageous."
By probing for specifics, we learn a property of courage. We might say something like "Courage is the ability to act against the compulsions of fear." Whether that's satisfactory or not is another issue, but it allows us to have a better understanding of what we're seeing in the world. It gives us a better example of acts of courage versus acts of overconfidence, inebriation or apathy.
The downside to this definition is, if someone approached me in public and asked me to defined courage; if I used this definition, I would probably need to follow it with an example.
To the contrary I believe that it is very helpful. One cannot apply logic or any other highly formalized method when he lacks definitions. It is hard to find a good definition, but at the same time it is the most important step in creating a theory.
> I think that the guy the Socrates is examining is actually doing a better job of having someone learn what courage is by giving examples than Socrates is by trying to state a precise definition for it.
Yes, it is a very helpful technique. When scientist needs a definition for a term, she starts with observing different cases. (Or rather she'd start with reading what other wrote on topic, but let's ignore this in the name of clarity). But she'd do it not like Laches by proposing examples, and not like Socrates by proposing counter-examples, but like they both: seeking for examples and then seeking for counter-examples.
> Although not precisely like an ML neural net, our brains are enough like one that that this is likely to be similar as well.
Our brains also very different from an ML neural net. Because we could dig a problem, construct a formal description of it, and then devise something like E=mc^2. We can generalize experience, while ML can only interpolate.
If you've never read Plato before, I'd suggest not to start with the Republic — it is diving into the deep end of Plato. I'm saying this as someone who has recently completed Republic[1], and thoroughly enjoyed it (and fumed at it in some places).
Instead, get familiar with some of the earlier, and famous, Socratic dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology (this is referring to a "formal defense", i.e. apologia; not regret), Crito, et al — they're shorter, give you a great flavour of Socrates, and will prepare you for the Republic. An excellent English translation here is the Five Dialogues[2], a fine selection by Hackett Publishing. I'm happy that I started with this.
[1] There are many English translations; I'll strongly recommend the "Reeve Edition". This translation recasts the entire dialogue as direct speech, this makes it easy to keep track of the speakers. Ensure it is this Reeve-only edition (because Reeve also revised an earlier translation by Grube): https://www.hackettpublishing.com/republic
I also consulted in parallel the Allan Bloom translation[1], which is more literal and aimed at the "serious student", as he puts it. It also comes with a long (and controversial?) interpretative essay.
[1] https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/allan-bloom/the-republic-o...
This absolutely could be a function of the translation I read though (I read Desmond Lee's)
τούτου μὲν τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐγὼ σοφώτερός εἰμι· κινδυνεύει μὲν γὰρ ἡμῶν οὐδέτερος οὐδὲν καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι, ἀλλ᾽ οὗτος μὲν οἴεταί τι εἰδέναι οὐκ εἰδώς, ἐγὼ δέ, ὥσπερ οὖν οὐκ οἶδα, οὐδὲ οἴομαι· ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι.
I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.
I love this quote though my Ancient Greek never went as far as being able to parse the original. That being said, I find the definition game mentioned here and covered in the Dialogues tedious. It's like asking what "the number 2" is: One can answer that pointing to two apples, two car, etc. sets with two elements and define "two" to be the common property of all these sets. Cannot one proceed similar to define courage?