Skepticism In Plato's Allegory Of The Cave

Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” entails Socrates explaining to Glaucon how all human beings are educated and the effect that has on them; he uses an allegory, a story with two levels of meaning, in order to illustrate his explanation. The story begins by describing a cave that people have lived in since birth and have been chained to in one place, unable to look anywhere except straight-ahead of them. Little do they know that behind them is a fire, and behind the fire is a half-wall with statues on top of it being controlled by another group of people beyond the wall. Due to the fire, these statues have shadows which are projected on the wall in front of the chained prisoners leading them to believe that these shadows are in fact reality. They

The Truman Show illustrates the notion of skepticism found in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” by using the set that Truman lived in and believed to be reality in order to compare it to the cave described by Socrates. Truman compares to the prisoner in the cave who is freed and is able to see the reality beyond what he believed it was his whole life. With Seahaven Island being the cave, the show’s director being the sun which caused Truman’s false sense of reality, and the outside world being the outside of the cave The Truman Show is a perfect modern day illustration of the notion of skepticism found in “Allegory of the Cave”. In Plato’s writing, skepticism is what caused the prisoner to doubt whether what he was seeing beyond the shadows on the cave wall was actually reality, leading him to escape his life as a prisoner. Truman displays the same sense of skepticism as he begins to question the world around him as peculiar things start to happen, thus resulting in him being able to join the real world without the fear of being watched and recorded. Similar to Truman desperately trying to explain his skepticism to those around him as they acted as if he was insane, the freed prisoner returned from seeing the fire sharing his discoveries only to be met by ridicule and skepticism from the