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is prosecuted. Plato is battling pro aris et focis, to save the central fire of intellectualism from extinction, and it is probably because he realized this as none of his successors have done after him, that he produced his great classical discussion of the problem, which is distinguished by ingenuity and ennobled, though not saved, by the frank confession of final failure.
That this failure was an inevitable outcome of Plato’s presuppositions is the next point for us to understand. We shall in understanding this understand also that no intellectualist theory of Error is possible, and consequently no really adequate intellectualist theory of knowledge. For a theory of knowledge which cannot explain Error cannot discriminate it from Truth, and so cannot explain that either.
With the usual naive objectivism of ancient metaphysicians, Plato starts from the assumption that Error is something objective and inherent in the object of knowledge. I.e., Plato has made the usual abstraction from the human and personal side of knowledge and assumed that this can have no bearing on the theory of logic. If, therefore, this assumption is wrong, we can at once account for the failure of his efforts, without being driven into the scepticism, in which intellectualist epistemologies invariably end.
But to be more specific, if the possibility of Error is dependent on the nature of the object, there must be an object of error as well as an object of knowledge, and the error must consist in our taking the one for the other, or getting the one when we want the other. To know this, however, we must necessarily know both. We must know, that is, the object of error as such, and to do this would of course be not error, but truth. For we should ‘apprehend it as it is’. Again, in so far as an object of knowledge is involved in error recognised as such, it is known truly. Error, therefore, always involves the contradiction that we must simultaneously both know and not know in the same cognitive reference. Thus a theory of Error is unthinkable. The same conclusion follows if we start from any formal view of Truth. For we thereby incapacitate ourselves for distinguishing between a
