The Powers of Comprehension

Explains Plato’s analyses of the three cognitive powers: knowledge, opinion, and ignorance. Shows why Plato’s epistemology in the Republic should not be understood in terms of the more familiar notions of propositional or informational knowledge, but rather in terms of exemplar representation, with the only completely reliable exemplars being the forms. Plato’s cognitive powers should not be conceived as cognitive states, but as the powers that produce such states. Moreover, the kinds of states typically studied in contemporary epistemology have content that is either true or false, whereas Plato’s cognitive powers produce something like conceptions of such things as beauty, justice, and goodness, which, instead of being either true or false, may be more or less accurate. These conceptions can then be used in the kinds of judgments we normally think of as the content of cognitions.