Abstract

In this essay I defend a reconstruction of the epistemological theory that, in a metaphorical way, Plato develops in Philebus 38b-39d. This theory explains how the human beings are capable of considering the experience’s facts. At the core of this theory, the soul is the intermediate point of a general process that allows to emit a statement related to objects of the world. So this theory also registers as a part of the history of the philosophical contemporary semantics. I will argue that three analytically separable stages are distinguished in connection with this operational mediation of the soul. At the first stage, the human soul gets blindly the formal characters of those facts by means of a composite pathema, which corresponds to a hexis of doxazein (form an opinion) and produces a fundamental doxa-logos. The second stage is the moment of the doctrine that explains the reason why we are conscious of what we have grasped in the analytical previous level. At the third stage, one may emit the utterances of those facts. Every stage corresponds to a concept of doxa-logos which have different characteristics, and it is opportune that they are distinguished in the comprehension of that theory. I argue for this reading against a number of alternatives.