NOTES ON RECOLLECTION IN THE PHAEDO

1. RECOLLECTION--mythical and rational interpretations. Plato's theory of recollection lends itself to both a mythological or literal and a symbolic and 'logical', i.e. rational interpretation. The mythological, literal interpretation would have the soul 'recollect' memories of previous lives, e.g. where the soul lived, what it did and suffered, etc. The rational aspect would have the soul 'recollect' those things that cannot be learned or acquired in this life, i.e. the Forms. Thus the soul would 'recollect', in the process of learning in this life, the 'eternal things' and 'eternal truth' that was 'always' innate in it, qua eternal consciousness. (Concepts like Triangle and Soul, Square and Just, truths like the Pythagorean Theorem, or the Socratic dictum that it is better to be a victim that a perpetrator of injustice.) Of course, some philosophers would argue this way of putting it is also mythological. They would insist on this formulation: the human mind can possess knowledge the justification (logos) of which does not rely on sense-perceptual (empirical) evidence, e.g. the truths of mathematics or morality which are normative and rationally self-evident or known by cognition alone.

2. APRIORI KNOWLEDGE--two meanings. The idea that knowledge comes in two forms, empirical or a posteriori, and normative or a priori, is an important theme in Platonism. Empirical concepts and truths must be learned or acquired through sense-experience, and justified or 'verified' by appeal to such experience, e.g. the concept of a tiger, and the truth that "There are tigers in India." A priori concepts and truths are, by contrast, conceived of as 'innate' rather than learned through experience, or as justified or verified through a non-empirical process, involving one of two elements: direct rational intuition of 'self-evident' concepts or truths, e.g. the concept of circle or square, the truth that "Parallel lines never meet"; or deductive relations between such truths, so as to establish purely rational 'proofs' of the truths or laws. Thus the geometer does not seek to justify or verify the truth of the Pythagorean theorem by measuring the squares constructed on the hypotenuse and sides of right-angled triangles in the ground, for example, but he proves it purely rationally, by deduction from pure concepts or definitions and principles of geometry (e.g. the parallel postulate) and mathematics in general (e.g. that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts). Thus there are two different meanings for what is intended by the idea of a priori knowledge:

1. Innatism, a psychological thesis: a priori knowledge is innate, not derived from sense-experience but 'hard-wired' into the human mind/genetic inheritance (perhaps acquired through an evolutionary process)
2. A priori knowledge, an epistemological thesis: a priori knowledge exists, different in nature from empirical knowledge, insofar as it is not justified or verified by appeal to sense-experience, but by rational intuition or deductive proof

3.  ARGUMENTS FOR INNATISM. Plato's doctrine of innatism, of course, involves the idea that the intellect/soul pre-exists its incarnation in the body, but as he acknowledges, it might also come into existence at conception (76c). This is how modern philosophers who have embraced innatism view it: at conception, the human mind is 'hard-wired' with a conceptual framework, which it utilizes to analyze and synthesize the data of sense-experience and learn language. The arguments for this theory are not unlike Plato's argument, and I will call both of them "poverty of stimulus" (PS) arguments:

Plato's PS argument:

1. we cognize Forms, which are perfect in nature;
2. all of the stimuli that come to us through the senses are imperfect in nature, and we can realize that these stimuli "fall short" of the Forms of which they may be regarded as imperfect instances;
3. therefore we must have had a prior, apparently innate conception of the (perfect) Forms, to realize 1 and 2.

Chomsky's PS argument: see discussion at wikipedia.