According to Plato what appears via sense experience is not what is real. Taking

Question

According to Plato what appears via sense experience is not what is real. Taking a clue from this analyze the table in front of you, which to your naked eye has a certain color, shape, texture. Will it look the same under microscope? Look around you, is there anything in the room around you that will appear as same if you look at it under the microscope?

(Hint: According to Plato the prisoners inside the cave take the shadows as "real" because they do not know the distinction between reality and appearances. The man who went outside and saw the "real world" comes back and tells them about it, and they ridicule him and eventually kill him, because for them what appears to be "real" is real and they do not want to know the truth).  

2. According to Plato, sense experience cannot give us truth, only thinking can give us truth. There are many things which we use as if they are true in everyday life, for example, we utter the sentence, "The sky is blue" as true, although we know that it is not. Give another statement that in everyday life we use as "truth" but it is not. What would Plato call such statements?

[Hint: Read the Divided Line power point, according to Plato, we can only have knowledge of what is real, and belief or opinion of appearance, that is, the unreal] 

3. Explain in your own words Heraclitus's notion that everything is changing all the time. Is there a harmony behind all these contradictions for Heraclitus? Is it possible for humans to grasp that harmony?

[Hint: According to Heraclitus there human reason is practical, it can solve little problems, but a humans do not possess logos, they cannot grasp the harmony behind all contradictions]. 

4. State clearly the premises provided by Thrasymachus in reaching the conclusion that "Justice is the advantage of the strongest". What is Socrates's main objection to this argument? Does Socrates say that States NEVER make errors? 

(Hint: Thrasymachus's argument All states make laws to their own advantage; the states are the most powerful institution is society; justice is what the State says it is; hence, justice is the advantage of the strongest; Socrates questions the university of the premise, "All states at all times make laws to their own advantage").  

Make two comments on two different posts from your peers.

Explanation / Answer

According to Plato sense experience fails to provide us any guarantee that what we experience through our senses is always true since the information we obtained based on our sense experience is often unreliable and always changing. This can be corrected and evaluated only by depending on principals that do not change. These unchanging principals also known as forms are the basis for the thinking or reason in the first place. So if we can prove that our opinion or belief is based on the unchanging principals of thought then we have a firm foundation for our opinion. This foundation allow us to think of a belief as justified and true and this is what meant by knowledge.

Plato's example of the sun, image of the dividend line and cave are all provided in order to clarify things we experience in the sensible ordinary world. The drawings, reflections or copies of sensible objects are not as real as the sensible things on which they depend. Concepts that depend on sensual imagination for their intelligibility for example mathematical concepts such as triangularity are more real than drawings of triangles or triangular blocks of wood.

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