Meno’s Paradox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meno
A succinct argument form of Meno’s paradox that I found online follows:
We wish to make an inquiry into/about x (x being an object of epistemology, covers stuff that can be known)
Either we know x or we don’t know x
If we know x, inquiry is unnecessary
If we don’t know x, inquiry is impossible
Inquiry is unnecessary or inquiry is impossible
As far as I can see, a nfr argument that thoroughly explicates Meno’s paradox.
How do we solve this paradox?
The paradox arises for people who lack a concept of “known unknowns” as distinct from “unknown unknowns”. If our knowledge of x can only be in the state of “we know what x is and everything about it” or “we don’t know anything about x and aren’t even aware that anything like x exists”, then the reasoning is all correct. However, for many things, that’s a false binary: there are a lot of intermediate states between “zero knowledge of the concept of x” and “100% knowledge of x”.
Gracias, that’s the exactly the point in me humble opinion. The origin (0, 0) for all knowledge is late Donald Rumsfelds’ unknown unknowns. That means we made what could only be described as a quantum leap in epistemology. Raises the question do we know anything we didn’t know already?
I don’t see how 3 follows.
Si, I have the same difficulty. However, sources indicate that Socrates/Plato/others didn’t brush it aside as inconsequential.
I tried googling, but haven’t found anything that could be considered a solution.
If you know how to solve this paradox, inquiry is unnecessary.
If you do not know how to solve this paradox, then inquiry is impossible.[1]
So why are you asking?
Of course it’s not impossible.
I was wondering if the paradox was solved. The Wikipage doesn’t inform much about its status in current philosophical discourse.
The solution seems a sine qua non, before we can make progress.
I think the paradox goes away with better models of “know” and “inquire”. Neither knowing nor not-knowing is an actual state one can have. There is only a multiplicity of models with varying degrees of applicability to some predicted experience. You CAN solicit updates and use experiences to update your models and your meta-model of the applicability of those models to specific questions.
That’s a very interesting train of thought. Would you like to expand on that a bit? Please read my reply to @localdeity (vide supra). How did we make that saltus from literally everything being an unknown unknown to (some) known knowns?
My preferred frame is different from that—no strict categories of known unknown unknown knowns or however many epicycles they’re up to. Not even a requirement that “truth” have any objective meaning (though there seems to be a consistency in my experiences that makes it a convenient model for most predictions).
You don’t know anything. You have a lot of models of things, which are all wrong in various ways, but still useful for many predictions. You can update the models and the weights within those models as you make observations, which makes them “less wrong”, as the saying goes. For humans, it’s probably not even asymtotic in predictive ability, it’s just overfitting to more recent history.
That’s ok, different folks, different strokes. Yet, in the world in which this paradox lives, it is a mystery how we went/progressed from an absolute unknonw unknown state to where we are now, knowns, known knowns, known unknowns, oui? Do you have a hypothesis as to how this happened?