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almost ostentatiously ignored henceforth, but no attempt is made to answer any one of them, and the argument becomes almost farcical in its unfairness. The logical value, therefore, of the ensuing argument is slight.
For example, (1) in 170 A Socrates insists on treating the difference between the authority and the fool as merely one in knowledge, despite the protest in 167 A, against this very trick of intellectualism. Protagoras having denied that differences in truth-value were merely intellectual, Plato makes a point of reaffirming his intellectualist analysis dogmatically and in the very same words. The protest of the Speech, therefore, has been wholly vain.
(2) So, too, were the protest against relying too much on popular language and the explanation of the apparently unfamiliar assertion that all always judge ‘truly’. For as 170 C shows, Plato continues to base his objections on the current use of the words ‘true’ and ‘false’.
(3) The argument in 170 D, which seems a clincher to Plato, is almost ludicrously inconclusive to one who has grasped the manifest meaning of the Protagoras Speech. It is in no wise absurd that an opinion (which you may roughly call ‘the same’) should be ‘true’ to me and ‘false’ to you; nor that one man should be right and 10,000 wrong.
For (a) it may well be ‘true’ to a lover that his mistress is the most beauteous creature in the world; but it by no means follows that this is ‘true’ to the rest of the world, nor is it even desirable that it should be. If then it is true that there is a peculiar and personal side to every piece of knowledge, he who has the experience alone can judge of its value. He alone feels where the shoe pinches or sees the subjective glow which transfigures the landscape. (b) Even where we feel entitled to abstract sufficiently from this individuality of concrete experiences to speak of a ‘common’ situation, it may be perfectly legitimate for different minds to evaluate it differently. All views may be right from their several standpoints, and they generally are so more or less. To deny that the ‘true’ mode of attaining the Good varies according to the circumstances of the agent is both intolerance and ineptitude, (c) Athanasius contra mundum and the
