Editing Plato (section)

=== Epistemology ===
{{main|Platonic epistemology}}
Plato also discusses several aspects of [[epistemology]]. In several dialogues, Socrates inverts the common man's intuition about what is knowable and what is real. Reality is unavailable to those who use their senses. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind. While most people take the objects of their senses to be real if anything is, Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In other words, such people are willingly ignorant, living without divine inspiration and access to higher insights about reality. Although Plato has occasionally been presented as having been the first to write{{snd}}that [[knowledge]] is [[justified true belief]] in the ''Theaetetus'',{{sfn|Fine|2003|p=5}} Plato also identified problems with this same ''justified true belief'' definition in that same work, concluding that justification (or an "account") would require knowledge of ''difference'', meaning that the [[definition of knowledge]] is [[circular reasoning|circular]].{{sfn|McDowell|1973|p=256}}

In the ''Sophist'', ''[[Statesman (dialogue)|Statesman]]'', ''Republic'', ''Timaeus'', and the ''Parmenides'', Plato associates knowledge with the apprehension of unchanging Forms and their relationships to one another (which he calls "expertise" in dialectic), including through the processes of ''collection'' and ''division''.{{sfn|Taylor|2011|pp=176–187}} More explicitly, Plato himself argues in the ''Timaeus'' that knowledge is always proportionate to the realm from which it is gained. In other words, if one derives one's account of something experientially, because the world of sense is in flux, the views therein attained will be mere opinions. Meanwhile, opinions are characterized by a lack of necessity and stability. On the other hand, if one derives one's account of something by way of the non-sensible Forms, because these Forms are unchanging, so too is the account derived from them. That apprehension of Forms is required for knowledge may be taken to cohere with Plato's theory in the ''Theaetetus'' and ''Meno''.{{sfn|Lee|2011|p=432}} Indeed, the apprehension of Forms may be at the base of the account required for justification, in that it offers [[Foundationalism|foundational]] knowledge which itself needs no account, thereby avoiding an [[infinite regression]].{{sfn|Taylor|2011|p=189}}

[[File:Temida, Gdansk Court.jpg|thumb|upright=0.9|"What is justice?" forms one of the core quandaries of the ''Republic''.]]