This is a partially examined life episode of 324, part two.

We've been talking about Plato's Craitalists.

Have we gotten through the analogy of naming, being like any other activity, which is his

argument, Socrates's argument for why naming can go wrong, right?

Knitting.

If you do it right, if you don't use the good needles, whatever the good needles involve

for knitting, I don't know enough about knitting, then either you're not knitting at all, or

you're certainly knitting badly.

That's the thing that if it was purely, if naming with purely a matter of convention,

then anybody gives to anything, it's just fine.

There's no sense in naming badly, it's just a matter of, I don't know, if your name

catches on, and other people want to use that name as well, there would be some sort

of popularity, but Plato's not going to be saying popularity is any kind of recommendation

for something.

Can we talk a little bit about how conventions are working here?

Because with knitting or crafts, you point to that because there's a sense of understanding,

well, what the thing is for, and so if you're trying to build a ship, you want to build a

ship well, and then you start talking about what the use of the ship is and what its objective

is, and same thing with knitting, if you knit a sweater, and it has so many gigantic

holes in it, and part of the goal of the sweater is to make something that keeps you warm,

then you're failing at knitting, something like that.

In the case of convention with respect to naming, how does having convention immediately

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