Psycholinguistics and Plato's paradoxes of the Meno.

Two fundamental problems in both psychology and philosophy concern the nature of knowledge and the nature of our acquisition of knowledge. No matter how "pure " it may be in research interest and theoretical intent, psychology ought to be very applied in the sense that it should seriously attempt to answer our fundamental questions concerning the nature of human knowledge and the process by which it is acquired. Yet, despite the spectacular successes experimental psychology has had in its attempt to understand the phenomena of its domain, it remains to be seen whether the answers advanced to fundamental problems such as the two above are adequate, or whether they are indeed answers at all. This article explores two problems of knowledge, which take the form of paradoxes, from their origins in Plato's Meno to their reemergence in contempo-rary philosophy and psychology. I trace the pendulum swing of intellectual fashion from Plato's attempt to solve the paradoxes with some ingenious postulations concerning the nature and workings of the human mind, through to Aristotle's (and the majority of contemporary thinkers') attempts to deny the Platonic machinery and the solution it envisages, and conclude with the resurrection of Platonic doctrine in psycholinguistics. Running throughout is the rather disheartening theme that we have not learned much about these problems in somewhat over 2,000 years of reflective thought. That is, my task is to convince one that the Platonic solutions, inadequate though they may be, are still 1 A number of colleagues and students have greatly im-proved this article by their constructive criticism. Those to whom the author is most indebted are C. N. Cofer, T. Halwes, D. S. Palermo, and N. P. Young. Obviously, they cannot be held responsible for the final result. Requests for reprints should be sent to Walter B. Weimer,