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You're listening to the partially examined life, a podcast by some guys,

where at one point, set on doing philosophy for living, but then thought better of it.

Our question for episode 324 is something like, how do words relate to the things they represent?

And we read Plato's mid-period dialogue, The Cratalyst, written somewhere around 388 BCE.

For more information, please see PartialExaminedLife.com.

This is Mark Linson-Meier, in Madison, Wisconsin, whose middle name was improperly given as

danger. This is Wes Aulon, worshipper of Kodidus Tan-Linon, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The translation that we're using, it's in the Plato Complete Works edited by John Amcouper,

the specific translator for this dialogue is CDC O'Reave. This is a very weird dialogue.

It's sort of like the Parmenides and that there's a whole section of it that you're just like,

I'm supposed to actually read this with my eyes. It's supposed to wade through this,

because it's largely about etymology. It touches the question that, you know, I mentioned at the

beginning, it seems obvious to us. Words are there by convention. They don't depict, they don't

represent the word dog. It doesn't sound like how a dog sounds. It doesn't sound like how a dog looks.

Oh, but maybe if we look at the etymology, Plato would say it'll be animalists,

barkiest, or whatever, you know, that we'll say, oh, okay. This is the kind of thing that he's doing.

And of course, he's doing it in ancient Greek, which is a nice way to remind us the readers about

what all these ancient Greek words are. It's nice to see those, but he's playing with this hypothesis

that maybe words actually do, in a very direct way, represent what the things that they are supposed

to, you know, that they refer to, they don't just point at, but they actually depict in some way,

so then it should be possible to have a name that is wrong. Yeah. The question is whether names

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