In the Phaedo even more than in the Meno, it is important to bear in mind that what we are calling “recollection” is actually a three-termed affair: it is a matter of x's being reminded by y of z; the term occupying the “y” position acquires importance in the Phaedo.

72–73: RECOLLECTION AGAIN

Socrates concludes the Cyclical Argument by saying that there really is such a thing as coming-to-life-again (ʾɑναβιώσκεσθαι): the living come-to-be from the dead and the souls of the dead continue to exist (72d8–10). The next argument is to have the same conclusion.

It is Cebes who sets it going by adverting to the Doctrine of Recollection, which, he says (72e2–3), Socrates has often propounded. The Theory of Forms is also presented as something often propounded by Socrates. But in the case of the Forms, we can see how the Theory is a natural extension of what Socrates had been saying in the Socratic dialogues, whereas Recollection is a drastic innovation.

As Cebes states it, it is that “learning for us is nothing but being-reminded {ʾανάμνησις}” (72e3–4). So learning isn't that for others. In the next clause (e4–5), he says that what we now recollect we must have learned at some prior time, and he adds (73a1–2) that this must have been before the soul was “in human form” (τᾷ ʾανθρωπίνῳ εἴδει).

The Meno begins as a Socratic definition dialogue whose topic is “excellence” (ʾɑρετή). At 80d, Meno causes the dialogue to abort by asking Socrates how he can expect to find out what excellence is when he doesn't have even a clue to start with. Socrates' response and the rest of the dialogue bring in several new things.

First, Socrates propounds the Doctrine of Recollection:

1. (DR) What we call learning is not really that, but recollecting something we knew beforehand.

Next, Socrates is prepared to discuss, using a certain method, whether excellence is teachable even in the absence of a definition. This requires renunciation of the Intellectualist Assumption, although the dialogue opens with a firm restatement of that assumption.

The method Socrates goes on to describe is often referred to as the “Method of Hypothesis.” It bears some resemblance to the method of Geometrical Analysis, on which it is based.

Finally, Socrates retreats from the claim that knowledge is a prerequisite for excellence: he suggests that true belief might be enough. This change from the stance of the Socratic dialogues is not of central concern in this book, and I shall have only a little to say about it.

Section 9.1 below discusses a background problem for the Intellectualist Assumption. Section 9.2 briefly discusses definition in the mini-Socratic dialogue. Section 9.3 deals with Meno's question at 80d, and § 9.4 with Socrates' response, the Doctrine of Recollection. Section 9.5 takes up the Method of Hypothesis.

Greek and Roman dialectic and rhetoric taught that the art of being reasonable and persuading people toward reasonable conclusions required an understanding of the relationship between what we know from within ourselves and what we learn from others. The former was our strongest knowledge—a boy mathematician could wield such knowledge with great force. The latter was weaker—wisdom and the experiences of long life were required for its best use. The former was individual, the latter was corporate. The former was solipsistic, the latter, forensic. For Aristotle and the classical liberal arts tradition that later developed, the disciplines of dialectic and rhetoric were responsible for teaching this relationship. Aristotle ingeniously created an intellectual device that served this and other purposes. He called it topics.

Topics was a schematic structure to be used mentally for analyzing, storing, and retrieving information. Organized in a triangular structure, the student entered it at the narrow top and descended through the structure adding to the breadth and depth base of the triangle as needed. Aristotelians for two thousand years explored this malleable structure, and at times let it dominate all of logic and epistemology, but more often hedged it in beside other Aristotelian categorization strategies. Sometimes it was described as a storehouse of all knowledge in which a student could be surrounded library-like with every bit of information in spacial relation to its related bits. Topics could help a person analyze and categorize knowledge. It could also help an orator preparing a persuasive argument gather diverse bits of evidence to support a larger point. At minimum it was supposed to help a person’s memory. The fundamental organizing principle of topics was epistemological, with the kinds of knowledge separated first according to their sources. At the entrance to the storehouse, the first division of everything to the left or to the right was a distinction between technical and nontechnical sources of knowledge. To the left was all the knowledge that was worked up personally within oneself. To the right was all the knowledge gained from outside sources, from authorities. The whole system of topics was driven by distinguishing information gained from within oneself and from various testifiers and authorities.

ARISTOTLE AND THE CREATION OF TOPICS

Diogenes Laertius wrote that Aristotle said that Zeno of Elea was the inventor of dialectic.

Renaissance teachers of logic loved Cicero and Augustine more than Abelard and Peter of Spain. They preferred the eclectic and practical values of the Romans over the medieval tendency to high formalism. The humanists of Renaissance Europe appreciated the earthy optimism evident in the following from Cicero:

Committed to teaching the practical wisdom of evaluating all kinds of arguments, Renaissance textbooks revived discussion of testimony and authority in two ways. The first was classical with an emphasis on the Ciceronian. Rudolphus Agricola and Petrus Ramus were the two most influential figures in this tradition. The second was classical but also eclectically Augustinian. The latter followed the way Augustine drew epistemology, psychology, and theology into a dialectic that served Christianity. Philipp Melanchthon was the most influential figure in this tradition. The art of handling testimony and authority was promoted in both traditions.

AGRICOLA AND RAMUS REVIVE CLASSICAL TOPICS

Rudolphus Agricola Phrisius (1444–1485) wrote the first major Renaissance logic textbook: De Inventione Dialectica. Circulating in manuscript after the 1470s and first published in Louvain in 1515, it gained enormous influence in the 1520s and ’30s. By 1569, Petrus Ramus wrote that “thanks to Agricola the true study of genuine logic had first been established in Germany and thence, by way of its disciples and emulators, had spread through the whole world.” Lisa Jardine, even though noting that the published version of the book was probably a result of “collaborative editing” and its fame an aspect of a pedagogic myth created by Erasmus, describes De Inventione Dialectica as the logic textbook “most widely specified, bought, and used in schools and universities throughout Protestant Europe, between the early decades of the sixteenth century and the mid seventeenth century.” Jardine warns against placing too much weight on De Inventione Dialectica as the source of the new Renaissance emphasis on classical dialectic; but we are not too concerned here with the sources of ideas. Textbooks are rarely such sources.

This book describes a lost tradition that can be called reasonableness. The tradition began with Aristotle, was recommended to Western education by Augustine, flourished in the schools of the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, then got lost in the academic and philosophic shuffles of the twentieth century. The modern critical thinking movement has tried to reclaim some of the tradition, but the central idea of reasonableness—the part that makes it broader than mere reasoning—remains gutted. For Aristotle and the subsequent tradition of Western education the difference between reasoning and reasonableness was partly a matter distinguishing three sources of information, the methods for handling those three sources, and understanding the levels of certainty available in each. The three sources can be generically called intuition, experience, and testimony. The first two were available to an individual reasoner, but the third was social. Testimony required the individual to trust information gained from other people. The first two were the stuff of reasoning, but the third was the key to a broader reasonableness.

One of the most provocative parables used to teach the subtleties of this aspect of reasonableness was first offered by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Locke has a King of Siam, while listening to a Dutch ambassador tell of the far north, suddenly recoil at the report that water gets so cold in Holland that it turns hard enough for an elephant to walk on it. Astonished, the king replies, “Hitherto I have believed the strange Things you have told me, because I look upon you as a sober fair man, but now I am sure you lye.” The story’s goal is to help readers understand that reliance on one’s own experience and reason is limited and that assent to testimony, even highly improbable testimony, from a credible witness is important for right reasoning. Although the story became the fodder for people on both sides of the eighteenth-century debate about the reasonability of belief in miracles, Locke had more mundane issues in mind. He was exploring the levels of certainty and guidelines of trust inherent in the slippery realm of information we gain from sources outside ourselves.

C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), an Oxford don, then a Cambridge professor who wrote popular stories and Christian apologetics in the middle of the twentieth century, had much to say about testimony. In one of his most famous children stories, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), one of his minor characters is a professor disgusted that basic principles of being reasonable had not been taught to the children in his charge. Confronted by the two oldest of four siblings with a fantastic tale from their younger sister about a land of Narnia, and a mean-spirited denial from their younger brother, the professor listens carefully and asks them an unexpected question:

They answer that their sister is the more truthful, but that in this case, her story just can’t be true.

Lewis, in the manner of the traditional humanist education that reached back to Aristotle, believed reasonable people should be taught guidelines for handling testimony. Among these guidelines was the priority given to the character and circumstances of the testifier over the material testified. In other words, given a trustworthy testifier, reasonable people must open their minds to anything—even things beyond general experience—or else they risk being caught in their own experience in the way that the King of Siam refused to believe in the existence of ice. Applying this rule of priority, a rule the Ramist called “reciprocation,” yielded not an absolute conclusion on the matter, but rather a tentative way of proceeding.

What interests me most is the professor’s criticism of English logic education in the middle of the twentieth century. The schools were struggling with how to teach the social aspects of reasonableness. Self-realization, heroic individualism, and a narrow sense of humility and democracy worked to encourage an image of the lone-wolf critical thinker.

The Port-Royal Logic was first published in French in 1662 and was initially titled La Logique ou l’art de penser. For its first half century of European use, its popular Latin translation was called Ars Cogitandi. Over two centuries of common use, it was sometimes referred to as the Jansenist Logic but most often simply called The Port-Royal Logic. Like Quintilian’s Institutio, The Port-Royal Logic is pleasantly readable, wisdom-filled, and organized for easy use by young students and old teachers. Although rooted in the mathematics-inspired reasoning methods of René Descartes, the textbook also offered a longer, stronger, and deeper recommendation for testimony in the art of being reasonable than any previous textbook. Most importantly it dismissed the Aristotelian tradition of topics, modeled a new four-part structure in which the first three parts described reasoning in geometrical fashion and the fourth advised on the broader matters of reasonableness. Testimony, probability, and degrees of assent were important aspects of this larger reasonableness. As the Ars Cogitandi—the Art of Thinking—it became the most influential general education textbook of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Key to The Port-Royal Logic’s discussion of testimony was, first, a traditional Aristotelian optimism about the persuasiveness of truth even among humans prone to error and deception. Second, it overflows with an Augustinian emphasis on the rightly oriented will and simple good sense. Laziness and lack of concern for the truth were presented as the enemies of reasonableness. Vigor, conscientiousness, and trust along with a measure of good sense were the start-up qualifications for thinking well and deciding wisely. “Right reason,” The Port-Royal Logic states, “accords all things their appropriate status. It makes us doubt those that are doubtful, reject those that are false, and recognize in good faith those that are evident.” Third, in Renaissance humanist fashion, The Port-Royal Logic advocates the naturalness of reasoning well. Technical terms, memorization of syllogistic forms, and frustrating added baggage were logomachies to be jettisoned. Finally, the book advocated mathematicizing good judgment. Dialectical probability was given more rigor through mathematics, and The Port-Royal Logic spurred long-influential attempts to treat testimony like a math problem. Disarmingly written, the book synthesized classical traditions, Cartesian reasoning, and Augustinian reasonableness in a way that encouraged and empowered readers.

The Greeks and Romans developed a place for testimony and authority in topics manuals as nontechnical, extrinsic, or inartificial arguments. The early Christians, dependent upon Jewish history and reports of Jesus’ work and resurrection, had reason to emphasize the reasonableness of reliance on testimony. Luke in his sketch of Jesus’ life and the early church bases his authority on eyewitness accounts. Paul, outlining his authority to teach, claims access to divine testimony. As Christians came to dominate Western education, they had good reason to retain Greek and Roman ways of teaching testimony and authority in the art of being reasonable.

St. Augustine is the most important figure in this creating a Christianized version for the dialectic using testimony. Augustine did not simply baptize classical traditions. He created a new tradition that was psychologically deeper, epistemologically more sophisticated, and ecclesiastically anchored. In medieval Europe the classical and Augustinian traditions of testimony and authority were constricted within two lesser traditions, the Boethian and Cassiodoran. In both cases, the traditions were stripped down and presented without the rich examples, discussion, or analysis of earlier writers. Boethius encouraged a philosophical and theological tradition that held extrinsic knowledge at arm’s length. He also tantalizingly but without explanation proposed a position between Aristotle’s persuasive truth and Stoic assent that depended on a spontaneous and willing belief. Cassiodorus was the most significant developer of a pedagogical tradition that encouraged emphasis on testimony and authority. Working in the Hellenistic tradition of encyclopedists who wrote economical and comprehensive guides to the liberal arts, Cassiodorus provided an overview of what should be taught in each of the seven arts, which became the model for the tightly packaged form of dialectic that came to dominate Renaissance and early modern education. Given the centrality of historical reports in Christianity, it is surprising that the Christian-dominated culture of medieval Europe did not do more with the dialectic of testimony and authority; however, Augustine, Boethius, and Cassiodorus kept testimony and authority firmly in the curriculum.

EYEWITNESSES AND FAITH BEFORE AUGUSTINE

Early Christian apologetics was founded on appeals to the authority of history and eyewitness testimony. Stephen, the first martyr, was stoned after reinterpreting the history of Abraham, Moses, and David in a way that supported Christianity.

When it comes to questions of human and divine testimony, wrote John Henry Newman in his An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), “Aristotle has been my master.” Like his mentor at Oxford, Richard Whately, and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Thomists and Scots, Newman believed that education would be best served by reviving the reasoning and reasonableness of Aristotle. First and foremost, he thought, the term “logic” should be reserved for formal reasoning—the study of the structures of valid inference from premises to conclusions. The sources and even the ultimate truth of the knowledge that serves as premises was not germane to whether a valid inference had been drawn. Great advances in the discipline of logic would come from this narrowing of focus. Secondary to this narrowing was Newman’s interest in the venerable tradition of Aristotelian reasonableness, drawn from Aristotle’s other writings on dialectic, rhetoric, ethics, and politics. Newman, being primarily interested in religious reasonableness, reached back to the Nicomachean Ethics to affirm one of the fundamental dichotomies of reasonableness: “a boy may be a mathematician, but not a philosopher.” Syllogistic logic had its proper applications, Newman believed, but cooks do not need to be chemists and masons do not need to be mineralogists. The life of being reasonable was broader, richer, and more subtle than formal reasoning. “Logic,” Newman declared, “makes but a sorry rhetoric.”

So logic textbooks in this revived Aristotelianism became less directed toward teaching testimony and authority. On the other hand, academic subjects were shuffled around as the modern university curriculum developed, and new philosophy departments were still expected to teach general education reasonableness. Here Aristotle was a model, since he had taught not only logic but general reasonableness. Aristotle had initially divided the sources of knowledge into intuition, experience, and information communicated by other people. In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle had wrestled with intuition and experience as “preliminary problems” to syllogistic demonstrations that yield certainty, and in Topics and Rhetoric he taught the handling of facts and opinions gained from other people that led often to less than certain conclusions. If philosophy departments were going to teach about the former they should hold onto teaching the latter.