Plato’s Meno Critical Thinking Example

(1.) Socrates teaches that one cannot learn virtue. Virtue is a matter of the soul, and whoever has virtue is sort of like a gift of the gods, although virtue, in whichever capacity has it, can be nourished and enriched. The Sophists, on the other hand, who were mainly paid teachers, taught that they could teach virtue in the same way we see self-help books in the supermarket that claim they can teach you to live a better life (for a fee). Neither the Sophists nor the Socrates are relativists in the strictest sense of the term. Objective realism is that objects exist in the world independently from how we may perceive them. Relativism is the view objects exist in the world depend on the observer’s ability to perceive them.
(2.) Virtue is justice; virtue is desiring beautiful things; “I know not what virtue is!”; virtue is connected to recollection; virtue is tethered to true belief.
(3) In the dialogue, the final definition of virtue is justified true belief and not knowledge, but no definition of virtue emerges from the conversation between Socrates and Meno that can be considered definitive.
(4) Knowledge is learnable by definition. Opinion is not knowledge because it is based on a lower level of understanding of reality. Even though opinion can be correct sometimes, it is not fully knowledge for it is not innate in the mind, and not tethered to anything real. For example, having seen a good person act in a good way does not make one have knowledge of the good, and even if a judgment is made, it is still only opinion.
(6) One aim of the dialogue is to come up with a definition of virtue that encompasses virtue as a whole. Virtue with a small “v” is only part of the whole. Temperance, or acting temperately, is only one part of virtue just not being sick is only one part of health. Virtue as a whole would, in theory, mean everything that is involved in virtue itself.
(7) Just as each bee has something in common that makes them bees, they all share in the same "beeness", so just as there are many virtues, there must be something in common that makes all virtue a virtue.
(8) Explain the following terms: Rationalism is the view that knowledge is innate, as opposed to knowledge derived from sensory experience; Ethics is the philosophical discussion of what constitutes the good; Virtue is virtue in of itself and not any one part of virtuous actions; Rhetoric is the art of argumentation in which the Sophists take part and in which Socrates disapproves, intrinsic value is value that is not dependent on anything else for its valuableness, relativism is the view, as it connects to the arguments in Meno, that there is no such thing as a common form of knowledge or virtue, or as Protagoras says: “Man is the measure of all things”; and aporia is the Greek word for a puzzle that does not have a clear answer that means that there is no conclusion given at the end of the argument between Socrates and Meno.