Hintikka on Knowledge and its Objects in Plato

Abstract

In a series of brilliant papers¹ on Greek philosophy Professor Hintikka has succeeded in helping us understand for the first time some major doctrines of Plato and Aristotle. Hintikka has been particularly successful, I believe, in illuminating Aristotle’s modal notions, and the influential view held by both Plato and Aristotle, that the objects of knowledge must be eternal or at least changeless. Especially in the latter case, Hintikka, in his 1967 paper, concentrated on identifying certain conceptual assumptions or presuppositions or tendencies which were widespread among Greek thinkers, and which explain why Plato and Aristotle believed that the objects of knowledge must be eternal or changeless. He showed, and documented in detail, that there was a widespread tendency among Greek thinkers to think of temporally indefinite sentences (occasion sentences as distinct from eternal sentences, sentences that can change in truth values) as typical vehicles of communication, vehicles in which knowledge and beliefs were expressed. Hintikka showed that there was also a widespread tendency “to think of knowledge in terms of some sort of direct acquantance with the objects of knowledge, e.g., in terms of seeing or witnessing them.”² He then showed convincingly that these two tendencies lead naturally to the view that knowledge must be of what is changeless or eternal, a view stubbornly held by Plato and Aristotle and central to their metaphysics and epistemology.