Agnes Callard: “Socrates on Sincerely Asserting What You Don’t Believe”

It is easy to understand how someone can recognize that they *were* wrong, or that they *might be wrong* about one of the many things they think now, or that they *will be wrong* about something or other in the future.  What’s harder is to construct a case in which someone recognizes that they ARE, currently, wrong about some specific proposition.  Indeed, the standard response to Moore’s paradox is to say that this is impossible–one cannot sincerely assert a sentence such as “The cat is not on the mat, though I believe it is.”  Socratic refutation reveals that it IS possible to sincerely assert such a sentence. I will defend this claim by pointing to just such a (Moore-paradoxical) sentence in Plato’s Alcibiades.