Do Chairs Exist?

[vulcanlogician]

You might be picking an imaginary side.  We can trust that protagoras believed that his statement about man and mans relationship to his own private wisdom was meant to be seen as objectively true of man...and....fwiw.it is.  It's more like..here we are 2400 years later..and it's still just us busting out the rulers, measuring things.  Judgements aren't coming down from on high, nor is truth.  I think plato shit the bed, entirely, in his criticism of protagoras...but only because he invented something to argue with a famous dead sophist about...and, being his own measure of all things, win.  Isn't this one of the things that plato is famous for fucking up, specifically?

Protagoras isn't necessarily about what Protagoras actually believed. Plato wasn't writing a dialogue to help his readers better understand the position of Protagoras. 

Rather he was using Protagoras as a mouthpiece for a position he wished to attack. This is something he began doing in his middle period. He does much the same thing in Parmenides. He depicts Parmenides as having a developed theory of Platonic forms, which is absurd because Plato himself developed his idea of forms to reconcile the philosophies of Heraclitus and Parmenides. But Plato depicts Parmenides as being amenable to (even familiar with) the idea of forms so he could say something about Parmenides' ideas in relation to the forms. The dialogue depicts a conversation between a young Socrates, Zeno, and Parmenides. Everyone knows this meeting never happened, and everyone knows that Parmenides didn't have anything close to the ideas Plato depicts him as having. Plato's motivation for doing this was rhetorical. It wasn't depicted thusly for dishonest purposes. Parmenides marks a point of reflection for Plato, where he tries to address serious criticisms of his theory of forms.

He also does this with Socrates. In his early works, it is assumed that Plato wants to convey the ideas of Socrates. But in, say, the Republic you have Socrates being used as a mouthpiece for what are Plato's own ideas. Plato's contemporaries were almost certainly "in on" this trend in Plato's writing. After all, many knew Socrates personally, and knew that Socrates wasn't trying to misrepresent Socrates. More likely, he probably saw Socrates as some sort of "muse." He'd become accustomed to expressing things through the mouth of his mentor and found it natural to keep the format of the Socratic dialogue, even when he went on to develop his own ideas.

It's best to understand that even if Protagoras wasn't a die-hard relativist, Plato wrote a dialogue depicting the idea of relativism. He presented the idea and proposed arguments for and against it. He was a philosopher. Not a historian.

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