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The Allegory Of Plato's Cave

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Hyo Kyung Tae
Mr. Michael Street
11 TOK
7th September 2015
Plato’s Cave People tend to believe and accept only what they’ve seen and heard during their lives. As people learned different things and different way, they all have different views of reality. Knowledge takes a big role in deciding what kind of view and reality that one will accept. One of the philosophers, Plato claimed a theory of idea to describe… Plato used the allegory of the cave to illustrate his theory of forms or idea. The allegory is about several prisoners who have been chained up in a cave since they were children. They are all chained so that their legs and necks are immobile, forced to look at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners, there is a fire. Prisoners watch shadows projected on the wall of the cave from things passing in front of a fire. Puppeteers carry objects in the shape of human and animal figures for the prisoners to see. As they live their entire lives looking at these shadows, they think …show more content…

I think the allegory of Plato’s cave is relevant and explains important aspects of the theory of knowledge well. His allegory shows the limitations that we have in how we accept knowledge. The other prisoners in the cave don’t want to accept the new knowledge because of their strong biases and their sense perception of seeing the prisoner blind after going out of the cave. The fear of accepting an unfamiliar situation blocks them from opening up to accept new knowledge. We live in our small socio-cultural box, and we think that any view outside this box is wrong. We refuse to explore it because we are already comfortable with our own thinking and afraid of accepting a new environment and any knowledge from it because it would make us change our perspectives, which have developed since we were

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