Meno's Paradox
The following is an essay I wrote on Meno's Paradox. Meno raises a problem concerning whether inquiries or a search for knowledge is, in principle, possible. Meno objects, “How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is?...If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing you did not know?” Socrates takes the word “it” here to refer to the form, or a standard, particularly the standard of virtue, although Socrates applies the problem to the search of any standard whatsoever. It isn’t certain that limiting the problem to the search for standards is what Meno had in mind, as Socrates first calls the argument a kind of debaters trick. Nonetheless, Socrates narrows the argument to just the search of standards when he says, “He cannot search for what he knows-since he knows it, there is no need to search-nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.” For example, suppose you didn’t know how to use the metri...