Gorgias on Knowledge and the Powerlessness of Logos

Abstract

In Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen and Defense of Palamedes, the orator draws attention to two important limitations of speech’s power that concern its different relationships to belief vs. knowledge. First, logos has the capacity to affect and change a person’s beliefs, but it is powerless to change or undermine a person’s knowledge. Second, speech has the power to produce a new belief, but it is powerless to produce knowledge itself where knowledge is lacking. My primary aim in this essay is to examine Gorgias’s epistemology of persuasive logos with a view to illuminating these two limitations. I suggest that Gorgias’s claims in the Helen and Palamedes make the most sense when considered in the forensic and deliberative contexts in which the art of rhetoric thrived in ancient Greece. In such contexts the prevailing epistemology that contemporary orators take for granted is a kind of folk empiricism that privileges sense-perception as a source of knowledge, and I argue that Gorgias’s ideas about logos and its limitations are best understood in terms of that epistemological framework. Speech cannot make people “unknow” what they have seen with their own eyes, nor can it act as a surrogate or replacement for sense-perception itself.