[Arisbe] Re: Inquiry Driven Systems

[Jon Awbrey]

> Tim King wrote:
> 
> I lack the knowledge and have found the time
> to follow all that you have written but is
> "virtue" in the sense that you seem to imply.
> Is this not "moral excellence", which may arguably
> be different from "knowledge" and the point of "Meno"?
> (Not being an angel, I have to apologise for rushing in but ...)
> 
> Cheers,
> Tim.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
>
>    From: Jon Awbrey [SMTP: jawbrey@oakland.edu]
>    Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2001 8:00 PM
>      To: Stand Up Ontology
> Subject: SUO: Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
> 
> <snip>
> 
> | Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught,
> | or is acquired by practice, not teaching?  Or if neither
> | by practice nor by learning, whether it comes to mankind
> | by nature or in some other way?  (Plato, 'Meno', p. 265).
> 
> Whether the word "virtue" (arete) is interpreted to mean virtuosity
> in some special skill or a more general excellence of conduct, it is
> evidently easy, in the understandable rush to "knowledge", to forget
> or to ignore what the primary subject of this dialogue is.  Only when
> the difficulties of the original question, whether virtue is teachable,
> have been moderated by a tentative analysis does knowledge itself become
> a topic of the conversation.  This hypothetical mediation of the problem
> takes the following tack:  If virtue were a kind of knowledge, and if
> every kind of knowledge could be taught, would it not follow that
> virtue could be taught?
> 
> <snip>

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Tim,

>From what I can glean from various lexica and commentaries,
"virtue" is the Latin translation for the Greek word "arete".
The later may derive from the verb "arariskein" = "to fit",
from which we get both "art" and "arithmetic".  Both words
originally had a hint of the "manly arts of war" in them,
as echoed in L: "vir" = "man" and Gk: "Ares", God of War.

So, it seems that arete can mean anything from moral maturity
to technical virtuosity, much like Taoists use the word "Tao".

The initial question in the Plato's 'Meno' was as above,
"whether virtue can be taught", and what developed next
was the tentative suggestion that if it was just a form
of knowledge (I think "episteme" was the word), then it
could be taught, since that much was already assumed as
being given, at least, for the sake of the argument and
as long as the moment in question might last.

This style of "factorization" of a difficult problem, that is to say,
a Fact in question, into a no-brainer Rule plus a most likely easier
Case to which the hard nut "cracks" or "reduces" follows the pattern
that Aristotle later dubbed as "apagoge" or what we call "abduction".

In the end, I am not so sure that I can say much of anything "substantial"
about the "essence" of "virtue", but I do have some hope of understanding
these and other patterns of formal reasoning, for whatever that is worth.

As it happens, this tactic of strategic reduction is formally analogous to
the "divide and conquer" strategy that is used throughout computer science
to deal with complex and difficult problems.  And it gets one to thinking ...

Many Regards,

Jon Awbrey

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