This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel War Burton.

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How do we come to acquire knowledge? That looks a deceptively easy question, but if we don't

know anything, how do we go about looking for it? And if we look for it, how do we know when and

whether we found it?

In one of Plato's dialogues, Socrates and Mino have a discussion about just this issue.

Plato believes that when we come to know something, we are in fact merely recognizing something we knew already, something we had learned in a previous life.

Socrates illustrates this theory of recollection by showing how an ignorant slave boy can know a mathematical proof.

How else could the boy work out a proof if he were not recollecting something he'd already

seen?

Professor M. McCabe says this theory, at least taken metaphorically, is not as absurd as it sounds.

M. M. McCabe, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much for having me.

We're going to be talking about the paradox of inquiry. What is that? The paradox of inquiry first appears in Plato's

Mino, which is a dialogue between Socrates and Mino, about virtue and characteristically Socrates. and

characteristically Socrates gets me no into a pickle so that me no just doesn't know

what on earth he thinks about anything and Socrates says in a kind of gung-ho way,

okay, Meino, let's carry on and we'll do some inquiring together.

And Meino then says,

how will you look for virtue, Socrates, when you don't know at all what it is?

...