Hey Crotchety_Crank,
Your name does suit you. I have in fact read (AFAIK good translations of) Plato and the Sophists! Very little Aristotle, and you’re correct I fell asleep once or twice during an ancient phil course. Not, however, during the Plato lectures, and my prof—a hot young philosopher recently tenured at NYU—presented a picture of Platonic forms that agrees with my own account. I don’t at all mean to imply that reading is the only correct interpretation, but it’s a common and perhaps dominant one—several credible sources I’ve encountered call it the “standard” reading. A few eclectic notes in response to more specific points of contention:
It may well be that Socrates did not believe in sufficient and necessary conditions—he is part fictional creation, so we can’t of course know for sure, but he obviously carries out his dialogues in a way that can be interpreted as challenging a view of e.g. the Good or the Just as having a clear definition. This, however, is a very different question from what Plato, or later philosophers who followed Plato’s footsteps, believed, as you well know.
Depending on how one interprets Plato’s language, specifically his description of the realm that forms exist in, and what it means for a form to exist, one can, perhaps, charitably understand Plato as not implying some “essence” of things. (OTOH, it also doesn’t seem an accurate reading to say Plato saw these concepts as existing in the mind—so it’s not clear where the hell he thinks they dwell. This question takes up hundreds if not thousands of pages of anguished scholarly writing.) But, important to note—as soon as one believes in an essence, “sufficient and necessary conditions” follows naturally as its prerequisite.
It doesn’t actually matter so much what Plato intended; what counts, pragmatically speaking, is how he was interpreted, and Neoplatonism + Christian metaphysics clearly believe in essences; their philosophical doctrines ruled the West for over a millennium.
It is clearly false to say that “sufficient and necessary” is a strawman that no one ever believed. Logical positivism, conceptual analysis, and the history of analytic all explicitly contradict this claim.
Whether or not individuals explicitly pay lip service to “sufficient and necessary,” or a concept of essences, is also besides the point; as I have argued, the mode of analysis which has dominated analytic philosophy the past century rests implicitly on this belief.
I see you’re brand new here, so a head’s up: discursive norms here veer constructive. If you believe I’m wrong, please make an argument for your alternate interpretation instead of casting ad hominems. Your last line is a sick diss—no hate! much respect!—but sick disses don’t hold much water. Other than a quotation by Aristotle, who is not mentioned in this post anywhere, there is no textual support in your comment for your interpretations of Plato, Socrates (though I agree), or any of the other listed philosophers.
Here is the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Wittgenstein’s life:
Family resemblance also serves to exhibit the lack of boundaries and the distance from exactness that characterize different uses of the same concept. Such boundaries and exactness are the definitive traits of form—be it Platonic form, Aristotelian form, or the general form of a proposition adumbrated in the Tractatus. It is from such forms that applications of concepts can be deduced, but this is precisely what Wittgenstein now eschews in favor of appeal to similarity of a kind with family resemblance.
Note that Wittgenstein was an avid reader of Plato; he cited the philosopher more than any other, but viewed his own approach as a radical break. (He did not read Aristotle! Interesting!) It seems possible to me that Wittgenstein himself, the authors of the SEP article, and the editors who peer-reviewed it, have fundamentally misunderstood not just Platonic forms but Aristotelian forms, and therefore, the entire legacy of Wittgenstein’s work. But that is a serious case to build, and it’s unclear why I should take your word for it over theirs without any presentation of evidence.
Your claims here go against major philosophical reference sources, many dominant interpretations of Platonic forms, and the interpretations of many well-informed, well-read philosophers of language past. They contradict various histories of the discipline and various historical dilemmas—e.g. Bertrand Russell, famous for writing one of the most definitive histories of philosophy, is sometimes seen as “solving” the Sorites paradox (an ancient Greek philosophical problem) by arguing that natural language is vague. I’m sure other historic philosophers have made similar interventions, but if this appeal to vagueness was as obvious and widely understood as you claim, it’s unclear to me why the Sorites paradox would have staying power, or why Russell’s solution would be taken seriously (or why he’d bother resolving it in the first place).
I’m sincerely interested in engaging—I do think the story is more complicated than this piece lays out. But arguments must take a side, and summaries must exclude nuance. If you’re interested in a good-faith discourse I’m game.
My research into animal mimicry, which closely resembles Baudrillardian simulacra, makes me think the slide in language/signaling from the first to second step is a potentially intractable problem. Once some association in information-space develops a reputation among situated actors, and is recognized as open to manipulation which benefits some of those actors at the cost of others… well, there’s no way to break the freeriders of dishonest signaling.
Let’s say that a black and red phenotype on a butterfly develops a reputation among predators as inedible (the butterfly releases toxins on being eaten). Now it’s protected, great! What used to be a lose-lose (predator eats toxins, butterfly gets eaten) is transformed to a win-win (predator avoids toxins, butterfly survives) by the power of information: honest signaling benefits everyone. This is “step 1.”
Unfortunately, the next step is other, non-toxic butterflies “noticing” (which is to say, evolution exploiting) this statistical association, and protecting themselves by dishonestly signaling the black and red, protected phenotype. This works alright at first, but it’s driven by frequency-dependent selection: the more dishonest signalers, the less protection for everyone, toxic or not. This is “step 2.”
But the actually toxic butterflies—the original honest signalers—they can’t go anywhere. They’re just stuck. One might happen to evolve a new phenotype, but that phenotype isn’t protected by reputational association, and it’s going to take a very long time for the new signal-association to take hold in predators. Once other insects have learned how to replicate the proxy-association or symbol that protected them, they can only wait it out until it’s no longer protective.
You may have noticed this is a very similar mechanism to Goodhart’s Law; the mechanism’s the same far as I can tell. It’s all about a publicly visible signal proxies for a hidden quality which outsiders do not have access to. (E.g. the lemon problem in used car sales, or size/confidence as a proxy for fighting ability in macaque hierarchies.) It can be easier and more reliable to just learn and copy the proxy than to evolve the hidden quality and hope other people catch on. (Think how many black and red butterflies got munched before the predators learned). It’s a bleak problem; I haven’t been able to make much progress on it, though I’d be super curious to hear if you think I’ve made errors in my premises, or if there’s literature in game theory on this problem.