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A version of this post also appears on ALTARWORK.com.
Too often in Western public discourse, I think we do not delineate rightly between knowledge and opinion. Political talking heads, religious leaders, and “experts” of many stripes offer us all manner of “facts.” Yet too often we accept what is handed to us as knowledge without trying to discern if what has been stated is merely opinion.
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Socrates’ Dialogue with Meno
Plato’s account of Socrates’ dialogue in Meno, deals not only with what true opinion and true knowledge might be, but also the nature of these things. This pursuit carries us through the lens of virtue: Socrates seems concerned both with what virtue is and what is the nature of virtue.
And here’s a strange conclusion: What is good and beneficial for humanity comes through both opinion and knowledge. “Now then, since not only through knowledge can men be good and beneficial to their cities, if they would, but also through right opinion; and neither of these two is natural to human beings … nor are they acquired.”
The study of the natures of opinion and knowledge draws us toward matters of diachronic and synchronic analyses. There’s two big words, I know. In a nutshell, something diachronic is developed through time, or over time. Something synchronic deals with glimpses in time, or snapshots.
At first glance, Socrates could be favoring true opinion as synchronic in nature. Opinion arises in single moments of time without the bother of experience: “Then in someone who does not know about that which he does not know, there are true opinions about those things.” Yet, with progressive questioning and dialogue, opinion translates to knowledge which Socrates describes as a “recollecting” over time. So experience is introduced and knowledge arises from a diachronic analysis.
Socrates elevates knowledge over opinion when it has been bound to the person: “And this is why knowledge is worth more than right opinion, and, by its binding, knowledge differs from and excels right opinion.”
However, late in the dialogue Socrates introduces the notion of divine dispensation which seems to flip the table on the synchronic/diachronic divide. This makes true opinion only the precursor of the knowledge that has already been provided to the human by divine inspiration. The individual has only to become aware of this inspiration.
The Misplacement of Objectivity
In post-modernity, we tend to want to make the difference between opinion and knowledge be one of objective truth. Objective truth has little to do with the whole scenario.
Unless I’m misreading Meno, Socrates does not appear at all interested in the objectivity of opinion and knowledge. Rather, he is concerned with the “why” of our understanding. The authority of any opinion must be personal. This could easily slip into arguments of relativism, except that personal opinion still must face the litmus test of communal experience. It is not individual knowledge that is bound so readily, but rather a multitude of opinions synthesized by experience which yields some measure of objectivity that is embraced by a community. Objectivity is not the starting point, but rather different culminations along the way.
This embraces the authority of both synchronic and diachronic analyses, not as separate, but as combined in ways that yield knowledge.
So we would do well to assert our opinions with a humble posture, knowing they are not objective things. We gain knowledge over time, a long time, as we discern among the volume of opinions.