[curious_yogurt]

>This is not starting off well. The first rule is to interpret him in the most favorable way possible

Actually, as a principle of reading in general, this is not a bad one. It does not mean that we have to decide that the most favourable interpretation is the one correct interpretation, but it does mean that it is reasonable to search for such an interpretation in the beginning. This is called the principle of charity. The reason the author recommends it is that often people will impute a particular view to a philosopher that implies the philosopher made elementary errors in reasoning or obvious falsehoods.

This may, of course, be the case. It is trivially true that philosophers make invalid or weak inferences, and false claims.

But there are two good reasons to adhere to the principle of charity that the author does not make explicit. First, if we do not, then we often end up short-circuiting our understanding of what the philosopher may be trying to say. That is, we may prematurely dismiss the claim as absurd instead of trying to sort out what might be the actual claim. Second, while part of philosophy depends on what philosophers are actually saying, a good part of doing philosophy is figuring out what our response to a particular claim is, how we ourselves would support that claim (if the inference is invalid), and what claim we would put in its place (if the claim is false). If we do little more than dismiss a claim as absurd, then we are not really doing philosophy.

So I guess what I am saying here is that making the assumption "Plato is a smart guy" is actually not a bad start for one taking a serious study of what he has to say.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

[abecedarius]

I would be careful about applying this principle to Plato because he himself advocates lying to students, insofar as you can take him at face value -- and if you can't, well, here we are. Plato seems to have been a smart guy with an agenda and no qualms about manipulating his readers. That it's manipulative doesn't mean it's false or worthless, but I won't read it in the usual Gricean way.

[curious_yogurt]

Does Plato actually advocate this? If you are referring to an argument Socrates makes in the Republic regarding politically motivated lying, it seems to me not unreasonable at an initial glance to say that Socrates represents Plato's position.

But it also seems to me that there are other ways to take this. First, the Socrates in the Republic is a character in an exchange — and so it seems not unreasonable to think that perhaps that character is not a simple mouthpiece of the author. For example, nobody would say Hamlet is Shakespeare's mouthpiece. Second, there are dialogues where Socrates gets completely trounced by his opponent — in particular, the Parmenides. Interpretations of what is going on in the Parmenides are diverse; but at the very least it seems that Socrates is not Plato's mouthpiece. Third, if (contrary to the previous two points) it turns out that Socrates is Plato's mouthpiece, but that mouthpiece is telling us that Plato will manipulate the reader as he sees fit, then it seems at least possible that the whole idea that Socrates is Plato's mouthpiece is itself not a straightforward claim. Thus, the grounds for your claim that one should be careful about applying this principle to Plato — assuming I am right that you base it on evidence in the dialogues — is not entirely solid.

As an additional point, it seems to me that even if the author wants to manipulate the reader, it still stands us in good stead to have a principle of charity. It is a starting point, not an ending point.

[abecedarius]

Yes, it's a passage in the Republic that I'm particularly thinking of. I have only the vaguest memory now, something like that only a few of the oldest and wisest should be told the real reasons for rules, and the rest should get various levels of cover stories?

Agreed that there's a deliberate indirection in dialogs; that's why I included the caveat. But to take another example, the Turtle is not always Hoftstadter's mouthpiece, yet Hofstadter doesn't seem especially manipulative to me. Plato (at least in translation) does. The passage I brought up just crystallized that reaction. I started out reading Plato from the usual charitable standpoint, and ended feeling that's a mistake: whatever's he's up to, it's not primarily to help the reader become a better independent thinker, or to accurately report events.

I've read less Aristotle, but he gives a different impression: someone with faults like overconfidence, but who's honestly pitching in to the project of improving collective knowledge and thinking.

[cgio]

I self-referentially disagree with the principle. We are conditioned to think that books and their writers and their roles and society standing are an implicit guarantee of quality or validity of their arguments. It holds to some extent, but I find it more productive to by default disagree with everything I read and let the author try to convince me. After all, not everyone agrees in this world and one has to build the anchor of their own ideas and convictions gradually so that they don't sway from one end to the other under the winds of the opinions they happen to consume. I would rather short-circuit someone else's argument and let it do its work behind the scenes in due time, rather than establish the practice of short-circuiting any process of building my own convictions and ability to argue my ideas. The important is to respect what you read and give it a chance to convince you. On the other hand, if you find yourself agreeing too much with something you read, you probably don't need to read it.

[ordu]

> I find it more productive to by default disagree with everything I read and let the author try to convince me.

It doesn't work great with texts. Any communication is done with background idea of a receiver. If you try to prove math theorem to someone, you need to start with some assumptions about level of math literacy of those who will read/listen your proof. If your assumptions are wrong, you either will tire your readers with trivialities, or will prove them nothing, because they cannot comprehend your argument.

Authors of texts make assumptions like this. If you do not assume that their assumptions about your preparedness for topic are too high, then you have a little chance to figure it out while reading text. Reading a math text you probably will figure out that text is too high level for you. But if you read philosophy it is more probably that you find author to be a stupid one with stupid ideas.

> The important is to respect what you read and give it a chance to convince you.

It works great with interactive dialogue, but with texts you need not just give a chance, but make all the efforts the need to make to convince you, because book cannot make any efforts. The more efforts to do to prove the author to be right, the more you would get from the book. In dialogue you can expect your opponent to make all the hard work to prove his point. If your opponent is smarter than you are. If he is not, than to get maximum from dialogue you'd better help your opponent sometimes. A book is a stupid opponent, a book have ideas but lacks intelligence to defend them.

> We are conditioned to think that books and their writers and their roles and society standing are an implicit guarantee of quality or validity of their arguments.

The goal is not to prove the author right or wrong. The goal is to get maximum from reading. If you read book, assuming that the author is smarter than he really was, and you spent a long hours to prove him wrong, arguing with more intelligent ideas than stupid author really had, it means that you have invented some clever looking ideas, and then prove them wrong. That was not obviously wrong ideas: if they were you wouldn't spent hours to refute them. So you have got more wisdom from book, than the author had in his mind. It is a great outcome, isn't it?

Alternatively, if you found interpretation of text, that cleverer than author meant, and you prove this interpretation to be true, than it is even more great outcome. Does it really matters now what the author really meant by his text?

[westoncb]

This also called giving someone the 'benefit of the doubt.' It's clearly necessary for a fair reading. The extreme form advocated by the author, while potentially problematic, was more just a signal to me of bias. And that's problematic for me, because what I want is someone to talk about Plato who knows it well but can be objective about it.

[ianai]

Phht, objectivity doesn’t need to be taken to an absolute. It’s ok to be a Platonist. Especially if you disclose it up front!

[blueprint]

> It is trivially true that philosophers make invalid or weak inferences, and false claims.

Then those are not exactly very good "philosophers" then, are they? If so, it's not right to compare them with philosophers. It would be a weak and invalid inference. A philosopher needs to be able to define the term philosophy, first of all. Let me tell you that it's not "a love of wisdom". If you define it like that then you need to be able to define love and wisdom in terms of 'what is'. Only a real master of philosophy was able to do so in history. And we only have perhaps 4-5 of them in the last ~6k years of recorded history.