Socrates and Probabilistic Theories

In cognitive science there are two main theories to explain how people categorize objects and ideas: prototype theory and exemplar theory. According to the prototype theory, people have an ideal, typical member of a category in mind that they use to compare to a new object. It’s like the “center” of the category, and even though it doesn’t exist in real life, it’s seen as the “truest” member of that category.

When I was reading the texts about Socrates, it seemed to me that this was what Socrates was trying to find. He wants someone to tell him what the “prototype” of piety and of justice look like. 

His way of looking at concepts like justice and piety, though, might not be the only way to look at them. There’s the whole other theory of how people categorize objects called exemplar theory. According to this view, concepts are represented by all the examples (or exemplars) that we’ve ever experienced. This means that the category “bird” is represented by memories of all our previous experiences with birds. Rather than have an imagined prototype of a single perfect bird, we compare it to all the previous memories we have of what we’ve been told birds are.

Since piety and justice are social constructs, maybe their definitions are entirely based on examples of what we’ve been told piety and justice are. Although I don’t believe that all of Socrates’ arguments were sound (for example, it seemed like a leap to say that knowledgeable people don’t want to outdo knowledgeable people), maybe the whole point of arguing was to make the point that there is no “center” or “prototype,” and that our definitions of social constructs are founded in experience. 

Socrates’ potential lesson that piety and justice are social constructs reminded me of one of my first meaningful college experiences, which occurred before I came to college. All of us Scripps College incoming freshmen were assigned to read “Imagined Communities” by Benedict Anderson over summer. In it, we learned how powerful nationalism can be, and how people have historically been willing to die for people with whom they have an imagined sense of camaraderie, people they’ve never met and never will meet, tied together by a few shared beliefs. Learning about this had struck me, because I’d never given much thought to the power of social constructs, and learning of their imagined origins made me feel more powerful.

I believe that if “imagined communities” had been replaced with “justice” or “piety,” it would have been just as meaningful of an experience for me. If giving that lesson to others was Socrates intent, maybe he was educating them in a way that gave them more power over the imaginary.