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How does the slave boy discover the proof without being told? Do you find Socrat

ID: 3443863 • Letter: H

Question

How does the slave boy discover the proof without being told? Do you find Socrates’ explanation at all plausible? Next I am going to show a summary of what happens, that will answer the question I just need to write the same but wil another worlds because the next ones are from the book:

When Socrates claims that knowledge is recollection, he is not only explaining what form our knowledge takes but also redefining what qualifies as knowledge at all. Clearly, the definition does not apply to everything we normally consider knowledge. When we find out in the newspaper what happened the previous day, we are not discovering things we’ve always known but forgotten. We get a hint about what counts as knowledge in the distinction Socrates draws toward the end of the dialogue between knowledge and true belief. This distinction, which plays an important role in the Republic, implies that we can be confident in knowing something only if we can give an account of, or justify, our knowledge. The slave boy may have guessed the answer to the mathematical problem at the outset, but he can be sure he knows the answer only because he went through the problem step by step, ensuring that he made no mistakes. This sort of rigorous justification applies only to subjects that consist of unchanging, abstract entities that are not subject to the errors and vagaries of everyday experience, such as mathematics. What we learn from the newspaper can never amount to more than true belief.

The argument that knowledge is recollection is bold and challenging, but it contains a number of problems. Foremost is the controversial question of whether the slave boy does in fact arrive at his own conclusions. Strictly speaking, Socrates only prompts the slave boy with questions, but he often makes statements couched in the form of questions, in which he arguably tells the boy the right answer rather than allowing him to figure it out for himself. Even if we do accept that the boy reaches the right answer on his own, it takes another leap to trust that he does so only by recollecting knowledge that he already possessed—let alone knowledge that he possessed before he was even born, as Socrates actually asserts. We could object first that the boy is not activating latent knowledge so much as latent ability. By claiming that the boy’s knowledge must be recollection, Socrates assumes that he is passively absorbing a set of facts rather than actively learning how to think mathematically. Second, we could object that the doctrine of knowledge as recollection does not explain how we first come to know things. Even if we believe that all the knowledge we possess came to us before we were born, such as in a previous life, we would still face the question of how we gained that knowledge in the first place.

Explanation / Answer

Socrates believed that when a person dies, only the physical body dies and the soul remains in the space until it gets a new body to occupy. So when it finds a body, it goes with the knowledge acquired while it was in the previous body. This Socrates in his alarm event boy example asserts that the knowledge that the slave boy possessed was from his previous birth.
There is also another contradictory explanation to that of Socrates which explains how the slave boy was able to answer. Slaves always attended their masters while they go out or talking to people in order to give them whatever they want nduring the meeting. So the boy had ample opportunity to listen to the talks and arguments of their masters, so it's not a wonder that the slave boy was able to come up with the answer.

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