Plato's cave allegory exhibits prisoners that are chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. The only thing they can see are the shadows caused by a fire. A man is released from the cave and exposed the the world he has never imagined. He then returns to collaborate his knowledge with his fellow companions of the cave. His companions believes he is a mad man, and all of his stories cannot be true, since they have not experienced the outside world of the cave, and the only knowledge they have about the world are the shadows. This allegory is a symbol for the contrast between ideas and what we perceive as reality, or true knowledge. Plato argues that we are slaves of the cave, since we live on a world of shadows, in which we don't see reality of ideas. Reality in plato's cave is the visible world, however it is much larger than it. Plato’s idea of the cave can be applied to various real world situations such as; the conflicts between Israel and Palestine for the acquisition of Gaza. Different perspectives are acquired toward this conflict based on the knowledge each side has. Even though, one side exposes their arguments and knowledge about the conflict, the other side cant accept these arguments since they have not grown up with the same vision of the world. A experience in my own life that involved different perspectives is something as simple as a soccer match. During a soccer match their is a fowl, both teams advance toward the referee to put pressure among his decision. Both teams will never agree that it is fowl for the other team. This happens due to the different positions each are put, as much as one knows that the fowl has happened he will not admit due to the consequences of it. It is a bit different than plato’s cave allegory, however the main concept is the same; different perspectives will cause different opinions. The cave allegory is also related to the video we watched in class the first day about maps. People who live on different areas of the world, will have different views about maps, always centralizing and expanding on the area he or she is exposed, therefore every map of the world is inaccurate, it is impossible to achieve a completely accurate map. Again, the idea that different perspectives will cause different opinions about the world is once again mentioned, and people who are exposed to new knowledge will often not respond well, since according to plato, reality is based on the visible world, or in other words on what you see.
Nice job, Rafael. You have plenty of ideas here, and that's a great sign. The next step would be to take a bit of time to really develop one of the ideas. In this case, you could have continued to analyze the situation in Gaza using Plato's Cave or continued to give details about how teams are slaves to the Cave. I'm wondering, though, if you believe that in either the Gaza example of the team example, that one group is outside of the cave, knowing more of what the truth really is, or if you think the people involved are stuck in different caves. Interesting ideas to expand upon.
ReplyDeleteHere's a knowledge question: How can we know when there is another layer of truth to uncover?
or If sides of an issue can be analogous to different teams, then who, in the real world, acts as the "referee" and how certain is that referee's knowledge?