The parallel speaks of readers who are faced with the task of reading a set of letters that are small and far away, and so illegible to them. In order to illustrate the viability of his proposed method for discovering the nature of psychic justice, Socrates describes a parallel situation in which the method’s benefits are meant to be clearly apparent. Socrates’ expressed rationale is that since one and the same feature, namely justice, appears in both these just things, once its nature has been discovered in the larger or clearer instance of the city the results can be applied to the more obscure case of psychic justice, and help with its discovery there. It is with this purpose in mind that Socrates proposes to examine what he refers to as a larger instance of justice, namely that found in a city, and discover its nature and benefits there. The challenge that lies at the heart of Plato’s Republic is to analyze human justice and discover its nature and benefits. After clarifying the details of the analogy and mapping them onto those of Socrates’ investigation, I use some of the basic features and presuppositions inherent to the field of the alphabet to shed new light on some of the basic epistemological presuppositions that govern both Socrates’ investigation of justice and the philosophical education reserved for the ruling elite in the just city. According to my interpretation the scene depicted in the analogy reflects a reading and spelling drill familiar to Socrates’ interlocutors from their days in Grammar school, which involved reading aloud a series of similar, but non-identical, syllables of varying length.

In view of these difficulties I present a new interpretation of the analogy, one that is both internally coherent, and adequately reflects Socrates’ philosophical method. Both interpretations face serious problems: while the first seems internally incoherent, the second provides a poor fit with Socrates’ actual method for discovering the nature of justice. In the past, interpreters have attempted to make sense of the analogy by claiming either that the reader in the story knows for a fact that the large letters he has found are identical with the smaller ones he is ordered to read or, alternatively, that he merely conjectures that they are identical, and intends to verify this conjecture by going back to the smaller letters and comparing the two sets. The interpretation of the spelling analogy in Republic book 2, which Socrates introduces as an illustration of the method he intends to use in order to discover the nature of psychic justice, has been beset with problems.

The republic book