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In the Theatetus how successful is Socrates’ refutation of Protagoran Relativism? The project of the Theaetetus is to unveil Plato’s epistemology, and more directly what he takes to be the nature of knowledge. Theaetetus, a student of Theodorous, puts forth the proposition that knowledge is perception, a view that is attributed to Protagoras and is the crux upon which his most famous dictum rests: ‘Man is the measure of all things: of those that are, that they are, and of those that are not, that they are not.’ To say that knowledge is perception is to say that what one perceives is true, so that the objects of perception are indeed knowledge. The dictum marks that each individual perceiver determines through his perceptions the nature of reality. The implication of the Protagorean definition of knowledge is the denial of any transcendental standard of truth, independent of the individual knower, to which the knower is subject. It is also a denial that there is a reality to be known independent of one’s own perceptions: either nothing exists beyond perception or whatever exists is unknowable. To assess how successful Socrates’ refutation is we must first assess how it is achieved, and from this consider whether Protagorean relativism can still be worthy of merit. To begin the refutation of Protagoras, Socrates first makes some preliminary objections. The first he construes is that one can not give such a special authority to man, as Protagoras gives by marking that “man is the measure of all things”.
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