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Record W2910931407 · doi:10.1093/pq/pqy069

Knowledge and Truth in Plato: Stepping Past the Shadow of Socrates

2018· article· en· W2910931407 on OpenAlex
Boris Hennig

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Philosophical Quarterly · 2018
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicClassical Philosophy and Thought
Canadian institutionsToronto Metropolitan University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEpistemologyObject (grammar)Argument (complex analysis)PhilosophyShadow (psychology)SOCRATESGRASPComputer sciencePsychologyLinguistics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

I found reading Rowett's excellent book, Knowledge and Truth in Plato, oddly exhausting; partly in the sense in which looking at a source of brightness and clarity can be exhausting, and partly because, while I find myself enthusiastically agreeing with her overall argument, I am not quite comfortable with some of the details. Rowett argues, among many other things, that Plato rejects the assumption that to understand a concept is to be able to state its definition, and replaces it with what she calls his ‘iconic method’. She also argues that when Plato speaks of epistēmē, he means conceptual knowledge, i.e. the grasp of a type qua type (or, equivalently, a concept). It seems easier to see what conceptual knowledge is not. Rowett argues, convincingly, that conceptual knowledge is not propositional (p. 107) or linguistic (p. 113). Although it may sometimes enable us to state definitions (p. 163), such statements are mere manifestations of it, not to be confused with conceptual knowledge itself (p. 27). Second, conceptual knowledge is not a sort of acquaintance with a non-propositional object. Following Frege, Rowett distinguishes between concepts and objects in terms of their role (p. 264), so that justice, for instance, cannot be an object of predication while at the same time functioning as a concept. Therefore, to grasp a concept qua concept is not to grasp an object, whether by description or acquaintance. Third, Rowett argues that conceptual knowledge is not a form of ‘know how’. On this latter point, I find her argument less than coercive. She says that ‘someone who has a grasp of a concept is likely to exhibit know-how as a result, but we should not infer that the knowledge consists in the “knowing how”’ (p. 270). I can see two ways of reading this. The point might be that just as an ability does not consist in any finite number of performances, conceptual knowledge does not consist in any finite number of abilities. But why should this be true? Abilities do not differ from concepts in the same way in which particular performances differ from abilities. Alternatively, Rowett might be making the valid point that where conceptual knowledge and an ability manifest themselves in the same behaviour, this does not imply that they are the same. This observation, however, will not force anyone to admit that conceptual knowledge is not an ability. It is possible that conceptual knowledge is more fundamental than any given ability that rests on it, but it remains equally possible that conceptual knowledge is itself an ability, and thus a form of knowing how.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.324
Threshold uncertainty score0.730

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.044
GPT teacher head0.259
Teacher spread0.215 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it