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Plato invokes the Theory of Recollection to explain both ordinary and philosophical learning. In a new reading of Meno's Paradox and the Slave-Boy Interrogation, I explain why these two levels are linked in a single theory of learning. Since, for Plato, philosophical inquiry starts in ordinary discourse, the possibility of success in inquiry is tied to the character of the ordinary comprehension we bring to it. Through the claim that all learning is recollection, Plato traces the knowledge achievable through inquiry back to our pretheoretical comprehension, showing not just that knowledge is in us, but that it is inchoate in the grasp of a property-akin to a concept-that enables us to speak and think about it ordinarily. Plato acknowledges in the Meno that a second step of argument, and a second application of Recollection, is needed to explain how knowledge comes to be inchoate in our ordinary grasp of a property. Though this second argument is provided most fully in the Phaedo, the evidence of the Meno is sufficient to outline Recollection as a two-stage theory of learning, beginning in ordinary speech and thought and extending, through philosophical reflection, to knowledge.
Plato's two arguments for Recollection are commonly taken to address different levels of learning: the learning of theoretical inquiry in the Meno, and the learning by which we come to speak and think ordinarily in the Phaedo. Such readings raise a question that has not been addressed in recent scholarship: Why are these distinct kinds of learning joined in what purports to be a single theory? What has the capacity for ordinary discourse got to do with theoretical progress? One reason, in particular, why the connection between the two arguments is obscure is that they describe recollection in different terms. In the Meno, recollection is characterized as the elicitation of a proposition, a true belief or an account, from within oneself (Meno 85c4, 85d6-7, cf. 98a3-5); in the Phaedo, by contrast, we recollect when we come to have a Form in mind in response to sense perception (Phaedo 74c7-d2, 75c7-d5). To explain the connection between Plato's two arguments for recollection, then, we must articulate the relationship between the recollection of beliefs and accounts in theoretical inquiry and our having a nonpropositional...