Evaluate Plato’s reliance on reason as a way to gain
knowledge as opposed to senses
Plato asserts that in gaining knowledge, we do not actually
learn anything new but that we go through a process of
anamnesis (or recollection) of things which our soul
experienced in the World of Forms prior to being born. This
would mean that we can come to recognise things without
having seen them with our senses before and hence gain
knowledge using our reason, as demonstrated in the example
of Socrates and the slave boy, where the slave boy is able to
recognise and identify shapes by Socrates asking him questions
about the shapes rather than explicitly teaching him about
what the shapes are. This reliance on reason as a way to gain
knowledge is useful as it may explain why we can identify
certain objects and ideals from young, such as feelings of
wrong or injustice which aren’t immediately apparent to the
senses.
However, the issue with Plato’s understanding of gaining
knowledge through recollection is that it is unfalsifiable – there
is no proof that the World of Forms exists, thus the process of
recollection is contingent upon a concept which cannot be
proven, which is problematic in relying on as a way to gain
knowledge. Furthermore, Plato undermines the senses as a way
of gaining knowledge and simply asserts that we gain
knowledge through recollection without considering other forms
of knowledge which we may gain through our senses from a
young age, such as using our sense of hearing to learn how to
speak. An empirical view such as Aristotle’s who claims that we
can use our senses to gain knowledge is much more coherent
than Plato’s reliance on reason since it strengthens the intrinsic
purpose of our senses as a way to gain information (which we
can convert to knowledge) and is verifiable to a much greater
degree rather than being coherent on an unfalsifiable theory,
hence Plato’s reliance on reason as a way to gain knowledge as
opposed to the senses is not very helpful or coherent as his
methods are far less coherent than the empirical/sense-based
methods put forward by the likes of Aristotle.
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