Abstract

I argue that Plato's thought evolves from the epistemology of the Meno, Phaedo, and Republic to the Combined Doctrine of the Theaetetus. The Combined Doctrine maintains that both Forms and certain objects rooted in perception are objects of knowledge. Specifically, the doctrine holds that a person acquires knowledge of Forms through recollection and through apprehension of the relations among Forms and that only with knowledge of Forms and the relations among Forms is a person able to know cognized objects through perception. ;According to the epistemology of the middle period, one obtains knowledge through questioning one's assumptions many times and in many ways . These assumptions are produced through the method of recollection , the method of hypothesis, and dialectic and they are true beliefs which have been tested for consistency . Dialectic results in reasoning up to knowledge of the Good and then back down, converting true beliefs into knowledge along the way . Further, the apprehension of the Good, and consequently of being, brings about a permanent change in a person's state of mind enabling her to know dialectical assumptions she previously believed. ;I conclude that only through a particular state of mind is one able to know Forms and that one acquires this state of mind by recollecting assumptions which direct one to reason up to an apprehension of the Good. I infer from this conclusion that one must have knowledge of Forms in order to know what appear to be physical objects, if such objects can be known. I also argue that Plato uses the Secret Doctrine as a theory of perception which explains the nature of cognized objects and that the Combined Doctrine, in its employment of the Theaeteus' theory of perception, is a theory of critical realism. Finally, I use the Combined Doctrine to resolve the paradoxes of the refutations of the Theaetetus. It turns out that the difference between true belief and knowledge for Plato amounts to a difference in states of mind. The Theaeteus' search for knowledge supports the complex epistemological and ontological underpinnings of the Combined Doctrine of Knowledge