The first half of Plato's dialogue
Ion features several arguments about the
nature of poetry
and about Ion's claims to knowledge
about that of which he speaks. And I
think if we take a look at the logical
structure
of these arguments we can follow Plato's
process of reasoning a little bit more
closely. It seems to me that we have
several related arguments
in this first half of the dialogue, and
we could represent
one of them as a series of conditional
statements,
as follows. If Ion
can judge between good and bad poetry
then Ion must know poetry,
he must know about, must know the truth
about poetry, about the art of poetry.
Second, if Ion knows poetry then
Ion is himself an excellent poet.
And then third, Ion is not an excellent
poet.
Ion is merely a rhapsode or performer.
He's not going around being the second
Homer, writing a new Iliad.
He simply memorizes and performs Homer
before audiences.
With those three premises we can work
backwards through
a pair of modus tollens inferences. Since
Ion is not an excellent poet, Ion does
not know
the art of poetry completely. And since
he does not know the art of poetry,
he must not be able to judge accurately
and well
between good and bad poetry. Now Plato
never comes out and says this latter
conclusion
in the dialogue, but I think it's there
for us, is there as an inference for us,
the readers, to draw. The second set of
arguments
is of similar structure and I think it
goes like this.
If Ion can judge good and bad poetry
then he
knows poetry. And if Ion knows
the art of poetry then Ion should be
able to
judge all poets, not merely Homer.
And then third, Ion cannot judge all
poets; by his own admission he's only a
good judge of Homer's poetry,
and of other poets only on the subjects
on which they agree with Homer.
And again as before we can work our way
now backwards through two
steps of modus tollens: since Ion cannot
judge all poets, Ion must not know
poetry. And not knowing poetry, Ion must
not be
a reliable judge of good and bad poetry.
So that's a very simple representation,
I think, of the modus tollens steps that we
can draw out of
some of the material that Plato presents
in the first half of the Ion dialogue.
I hope you found this edifying. Thanks
for watching today; goodbye.
