Great Dialogues

Explain Plato's theory of knowledge as recollection.

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Socrates reasons that it is impossible for something to come from nothing. Thus, if the mind is a blank slate, than it would be impossible for anyone to learn anything, since knowledge learned must come from something. To escape this paradox, Socrates reasons that we must already know everything that we could possibly learn, but we have forgotten it at birth. Learning, therefore, is recalling or reactivating constructs that are intrinsic to our mind. To illustrate this theory, Socrates shows Meno that even an uneducated slave boy can reason through a simple geometry problem when asked guiding questions.

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Great Dialogues