SEP 21 2012 ‘The Allegory of The Cave’ by Plato: Summary and Meaning

[Mindful]

The ‘Allegory Of The Cave’ is a theory put forward by Plato, concerning human perception. Plato claimed that knowledge gained through the senses is no more than opinion and that, in order to have real knowledge, we must gain it through philosophical reasoning.

‘The Allegory of the Cave’ by Plato

In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato distinguishes between people who mistake sensory knowledge for the truth and people who really do see the truth.

It goes like this:

8216 The Allegory of The Cave 8217 by Plato Summary and Meaning Welcome to the Philosophyzer

 

[midcan5]

The trouble with this is it is too easy to disprove. I've never met anyone who faced with a sensory block says, or thinks, this ain't so, let me think about this a bit. A cliff could serve as an example. Of course we are often programmed to see sensory information through a filter. Think racism, poverty, sexism, or welfare as examples. We often have pat answers so maybe philosophizing may help here provided we are open to ideas. I often think it is more experience than other items that form our perceptions.

"...the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance..." David Foster Wallace DAVID FOSTER WALLACE IN HIS OWN WORDS More Intelligent Life

 

[Mindful]

Some people maintain that no philosopher after Plato came even close to him. He was the "one and only".