Epistemological Beliefs and Organizational Leadership
Epistemological Philosophies: Comparing Plato and Protagoras
To understand our quest for knowledge, we often have to go back to some of the classical theories in order to get a full view of how modern theories have developed. Understanding classical philosophy is not blindly reading one philosopher and then assuming you have the knowledge of thousands of years of Greco-Roman thought. There were major differences within the philosophers of that time, and these differences have remained to influence more modern philosophical thought. Understanding the similarities and differences of two very different minds like Plato and Protagoras can help clarify the differences in epistemological theories and how they relate to organizational leadership today.
Plato was a classical Greek philosopher whose work has continued to influence the field of philosophy and the study of epistemology even into the present day. Plato's works are often disguised within a relatively informal seeming dialogue between his mentor Socrates, who never wrote any of his own teachings down and other individuals that Socrates meets along his travels in and around Athens. Thus, we as the reader are exposed to Plato's sense of epistemology through a third party, making it a much different format than the one encountered in the works of Protagoras. In his work, The Republic, Plato recounts a number of conversations Socrates was supposedly engaged in, and through this medium, Plato revels his unique image of epistemology and the nature of how human beings know and learn.
According to what Plato believed in his sense of Platonic epistemology, knowledge is already within us all. The things we have to learn do not come from some outside experience, but rather are there within us from the very start. This is a view of knowledge that shows it is innately within our own beings, but we have to discover it ourselves through a process of reawakening the knowledge we already have (Feldman, 2003). Many philosophers throughout history have sensed that knowledge does come from within (Nonaka & Nishiguchi, 2001). Plato famously discuses his allegory of the man in the cave to show how the light of knowledge was always there, yet it was hidden behind us as we were not facing the mouth of the cave, and thus blinded by our own limitations of exploration. Once the man leaves the cave he can know real knowledge outside of the shadowy figures he though was knowledge beforehand (Cooper, 1999). The light was always there, but it must be our choice to seek it out, and that is where knowledge comes from. Rather than learning from an external stimulus or experience, we are guided through reawakening the knowledge already inside of us with the help of a mediator who brings us to the attention of what it is we want to find that is already inside of us. Thus, no information is ever new, but rather it is lying dormant within ourselves and is reawakened at a time and place where we begin to search for it within ourselves with the help of someone more knowledgeable than us who can help us reach the information we seek within ourselves. Plato developed this theory largely to help show how humans could have knowledge about things that go beyond our "sensory experience" (Moser & vander Nat, 2003, p 32). As such, Plato emphasizes the importance of a third party in reawakening the already innate knowledge that had been lying dormant within the individual. Here, Plato writes of Socrates saying, "even if a person's eyes are capable of sight, and he's trying to use it, and what he's trying to look at is colored, the sight will see nothing and the colors will remain unseen, surely, unless there is also present an extra third thing which is made specifically for this purpose" (Cooper, 1999, p 22). The mediator is the third thing in a person's quest to learn. The knowledge is already there, but they need that third thing, being a teacher or a leader, to help see it. Someone who has already experienced this awakening can then help others experience it as well through mediating their journey into themselves.
Quite on the opposite spectrum of the image of Platonic epistemology is what is known as epistemological relativism. One of the major figures of this style pf philosophy is Protagoras, another Greek philosopher of about the same time as Plato and Socrates, although with quite a different outlook on life and knowledge. His thoughts later went on to influence major philosophers like Descartes and his Cartesian doubt. This style of relativism was based enormously on skepticism (Feldman, 2003). It focuses on explaining how knowing what we know not through thorough and careful...
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