Meno's Paradox

The world of epistemology is intricate and befuddling. Like quantum physics. It explains a lot about what we do know, but there are still a lot of things that we don't know and are left postulating about in the meantime. One such window into this convoluted system can be found in Meno's Paradox. Meno and Socrates, in true Socratic-dialog-esque form, had completed the obligatory first and second portions of their conversation (the methods of which I will not go into, as the Socratic dialogs were very formulaic and can be looked up in almost any Western or world philosophy textbook), and had reached the third portion, in which Socrates and his respondent would agree to search as humble companions for the true knowledge regarding the topic they had been discussing. Meno, however, had an interesting question that deviated from the usual happy ending: How would Socrates (or anyone, really) recognize the answer to the question he was trying to solve, not knowing what it was? How would he recognize something he'd never known? Socrates expertly batted it away with the concept of innate ideas, claiming that the soul was eternal (and thus knew everything), making all "learning" really just remembering. Socrates thus moved on to bigger and better philosophical concepts, leaving Meno with the choice of agreeing with Socrates, or not accepting the concept of innate ideas and thus being left hanging with what is still known as Meno's Paradox.

I think I may yet have solved this paradox--or at least, I have removed the utter paradoxicality of it, reducing it to a similar level with other things epistemological. Under Meno's Paradox, you cannot ever happen across something you do not know and know it for what it is (i.e., the answer to a question). So, all things must then proceed from what you already know, plus perhaps a healthy helping of reasoning. The concept of innate ideas makes the elimination of this paradox all too facile, so let's look at it another way. Suppose you are Louis Pasteur, on the brink of discovering penicillin to be the first antibiotic. (Mind you, this was an entirely accidental happening. The penicillin mold had contaminated, in his mind, the bacteria he had been working with.) You then notice that the bacteria on the petri dish you had been working with had died out around the mold that had somehow gotten into it. Most people would not say at this point, "Oh look! There's penicillin, the world's first antibiotic!"(Though that might be a touch amusing and yet eerily prophetic to behold, should it ever happen in your vicinity.) Instead, one might say, "Oh look! That mold appears to be doing something that's making all that bacteria die! I should test this further and see if I can figure out why!" In so doing, we come to the breaker of the Paradox of Meno: you don't recognize the answer to a problem by what it looks like, but rather by what it does. You test it, and in so doing establish it as the tentative answer. As more information comes along that may support or detract from the original answer, you then are able to alter it as needed. (Indeed, taking pills composed of live penicillin mold might not prove at all helpful to us--but the mold itself seemed, at first, to be the sole reason for the death of the bacteria. It took quite a bit of testing and isolation before scientists figured out what compound was actually responsible for the antibacterial action of that pesky mold in Pasteur's petri dish.)

This, at the very least, unceremoniously dumps us back at the central point of epistemology--can we ever really know anything for certain? Can we know that what we "know" is true, or can even be known? Can we ever claim to understand something when further information may modify it enough to no longer be the same? (Socrates cleverly sidesteps the main blow of this concept by the way, as having innate ideas means you already know all there is to know--you just have to figure out how to remember it--and you don't know what cannot be known, nor will you ever.) But at least Meno can rest in peace, "knowing" that his paradox seems to have been solved, at least to the extent that the classic contortions of epistemology will allow.