Oslo Mind, Language and Epistemology Network Seminar: Derek van Zoonen, Hedonic Cognitivism and Fallibilism in Plato’s Philebus

In the Philebus, one of Plato’s latest dialogues, Socrates and the hedonists Philebus and Protarchus discuss what eudaimonia consists in. In the course of attacking his interlocutors’ hedonism—the view that pleasure is the good and the life of pleasure the best possible life—Socrates claims, quite unexpectedly, that pleasures can be pseudês (false, unreal, deceptive). In the first half of this paper—the half you will be reading—I try shed line on this puzzling line of thought; in the second half of this paper—the half I excluded—I argue how Plato’s fallibilism, and the underlying cognitivism or representationalism, make trouble for hedonism as a theory of well-being. The Fallibilism Argument I am examining here can be broken down into roughly two pieces of argument—what I call Argument A and Argument B (for lack of better labels).  Argument A suggests that pleasure is relevantly similar to a representational attitude like belief, and thus truth-evaluable (albeit in a derivative sense), whereas Argument B suggests that pleasure consists is, or is constituted by, representational attitudes (doxai and phantasmata), and thus truth-evaluable in a stronger, proper sense of the word. More specifically, I argue that any pleasure necessarily involves an informational component and an evaluative component: it suggests that some state of affairs obtains and that this state of affairs bears positively on the agent’s cares and concerns and is conducive to their flourishing.