The political rhetoric in loss of knowledge: The current anticientificism thought from the concept of episteme in Plato’s Theaetetus dialogue

Abstract

The question proposed in this article is assumed to be essential to safeguard the truth value of knowledge and scientific research. The article demonstrates that, although presenting itself as an aporetic text, the Theaetetus dialogue contributes greatly to our time to think critically about knowledge and its unequivocal relationship with politics and rhetoric, so that it became possible to philosophically problematize question of anti-scientificism present in our contemporary context. It is concluded that the episteme in Plato goes beyond the limits considered by aisthesis (sense) and that we can only effectively consider episteme when considering the knowledge of the really real, that is, the forms (eidos) that categorize the intelligible. Nevertheless, the provisional definition of “knowledge as a true opinion accompanied by a rational explanation” still imposes itself as an important paradigm to distinguish science (gnosis) from pseudoscience. Because, although the episteme is not based “on the impressions that reach the soul through the body”, reasoning about it is imperative, an aspect that, it seems, usually appears as a fortuitous element in the uses of an immediate and negationist political rhetoric, therefore, overmuch anti-scientific.