Socrates is often the character in Plato’s dialogues who asks thought provoking questions that do not seem to have answers. However, in Meno, the situation is reversed, and Meno ponders about the process of inquiry during a discussion about virtue,
“But how will you look for something when you don’t in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don’t know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you’ve found is the thing you didn’t know?” (Meno 80d-e).
These questions eventually became known as Meno’s Paradox. Socrates responds to Meno, but his explanation for the paradox, his Theory of Recollection, can barely satisfactorily explain inquiry as a process for acquiring non-empirical information; when one applies his theory to empirical knowledge the theory seems to collapse completely.
“Meno’s Paradox,” also known as “The Paradox of Inquiry,” questions how anyone could ever truly know when he has succeeded in finding a correct answer, whether that be an answer to an empirical or a non-empirical question. In layman’s terms, I will now try to describe Meno’s objection to the entire process of inquiry. One begins in one of two states: either the person knows what he is looking for, or he does not know what he is looking for. If the individual knew what he was looking for, inquiry itself would be altogether unnecessary, due to the fact that the information would already be known. However, if the individual did not know what he was looking for, inquiry itself would be altogether impossible. One cannot look for something without knowing what it is he is looking for. Therefore, inquiry seems to be either completely unnecessary or utterly impossible. Thus, one cannot learn what he already knows or what he does not know. At the very most one could only know the questions he does not have answers to, but, even then, there would never be any way to know when one has stumbled upon a correct answer.
