Socrates holds throughout the dialogues that virtue is a form of knowledge — specifically, knowledge of what is good and bad, beneficial and harmful. This is why he insists that no one does wrong willingly: wrongdoing is always a kind of ignorance, a miscalculation about what is truly good. If virtue is knowledge, and if knowledge is teachable (as the theory of recollection suggests), then virtue should be teachable. But Meno's opening question — "Can virtue be taught?" — is harder to answer than it seems.
The empirical test: if virtue can be taught, there should be teachers of it. But who are they? The Sophists claim to teach virtue and charge fees for it — but Socrates's questioning has repeatedly shown that neither the Sophists nor the prominent Athenians whom one might expect to be experts in virtue can give a satisfactory account of what virtue is. And if they cannot define it, they cannot reliably transmit it. The virtuous men of Athens — Themistocles, Aristides, Pericles — failed to produce virtuous sons despite every advantage. This suggests virtue is not straightforwardly teachable.
The dialogue introduces a crucial distinction: the difference between true opinion and knowledge. A man with true opinion about the road to Larissa will guide you there as reliably as one who knows — as long as his opinion remains true. But opinion can go wrong; it lacks the "tethering" that knowledge provides. The virtuous men of Athens may have had true opinions about what virtue requires in their specific circumstances, without having knowledge of virtue as such. This makes their virtue reliable in practice but fragile in principle — and incommunicable, since you cannot teach what you cannot articulate.
The Meno's conclusion is deliberately provocative: if virtue is not knowledge (because there are no teachers), and if it is not natural (because nature cannot account for particular virtuous men), then it must come by divine dispensation — a kind of inspired gift, like the inspiration of poets, who produce beautiful things without understanding how. Socrates offers this conclusion "without knowledge," as a hypothesis. It leaves the fundamental question open: is Socratic ignorance — the knowledge that one does not know — itself the beginning of genuine virtue?
The distinction between knowledge (episteme) and true opinion (doxa) in the Meno is foundational for the theory of knowledge developed in the Republic and Theaetetus. The claim that virtue is knowledge is sometimes called "Socratic intellectualism" and is one of the most distinctive and controversial claims in the Socratic dialogues — disputed by Aristotle, who argued that moral virtue requires habituation and emotional formation, not merely intellectual grasp.
