I. Let us begin with the fact that knowledge and opinion are powers—which is to say abilities—and ignorance is at least suggested to be one as well (477d-e). Despite it being true that ignorance, as opposed to knowledge and opinion, is not explicitly said to be a power by either Socrates or Glaucon, it is safe to say that Plato most clearly treats it as such. We are told that powers ought to be distinguished in virtue of two attributes: (i) what they are related to and (ii) what they accomplish (477d). Each of these two conditions are invoked in order to distinguish ignorance from both knowledge and opinion as if Plato were, in fact, solely distinguishing among powers. Ignorance is related to ‘what is not’, while knowledge is related to ‘what is’, and opinion to what lies in-between both (I will have more to say on this later). And, opinion, Socrates says, is both darker than knowledge and clearer than ignorance (478a-e). This should be understood as a characterization of the corresponding cognitive state that each cognitive power accomplishes—knowing, ignoring, and opining, respectively. We are, thus, moved to take ignorance as a power in order to accept the soundness of these comparisons among powers, the distinctions that follow from them, and the definition of opinion as an intermediate between knowledge and ignorance. Ignorance is a power—a cognitive power to put it in more contemporary terms —and yet, because of the obscurity of this assertion, little is accomplished by it as far as clarifying the nature of ignorance goes. To define ignorance as an ability is clearly an idea that lacks complete intuitive sympathy, to say the least, from current readers of Plato. We rarely think of ignorance this way since we are much more prompt to understand it in terms of knowledge itself; we think of ignorance, in some way or another, as an absence of knowledge. Thus, the question of how we are to understand Plato’s power of ignorance remains. All the more so, if one considers that, if ignorance is a power, then ignorance must have a set of intrinsic relata as a distinguishing factor from the rest of cognitive powers. Powers are said by Socrates to be ‘set over’ their relata in such an exclusive manner that it constitutes one of the two distinguishing attributes among powers. In other words, no two distinct powers can have the same relata. The importance of this differentia is evident, but the meaning of the expression “set over” used to describe the nature of the relationship between each power and its corresponding set of relata has been a matter of much scholarly debate. It is often thought that each power is about or of its relata, as if a power’s relata were its subject-matter. The fact that knowledge, for instance, is set over ‘what is’ would mean, under this particular interpretation of Plato’s writing, that knowledge is about or of ‘what is’. Nevertheless, as common as this interpretation may be, when applied to Plato’s power of ignorance it seems rather limited, clarifying little of how we are to
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