Are all philosophers subject to a variation of the Socrates problem?

Question

Obviously, the specific problem of knowing who Socrates was and what he taught is wholly unique to the man. However, reading books and articles about philosophers and philosophy, I'm struck by the occasions when later commentators disagree about what particular thinkers actually taught. Obviously, for living philosophers, it's possible to simply ask them. But even the best of us seem destined to die and leave nothing but memories and the corpus of texts (and other recordings) that we bother to archive and which are preserved.

The problem is that few thoughts are complete and unambiguous. Those that are seem trivial. Over time, the context in which thinking is done becomes diffused and obscured by new context. Even fundamental tools of thought, such as language and basic assumptions change over time. It seems like a great difficulty in understanding a thinker from a different era is to put oneself in their mode of thinking, which may be impossible.

Is this an intractable problem or is it possible some innovation in communication can solve it?

(For those who are unaware, please read Early Attempts to Solve the Socratic Problem.)

Answer 1

I'd suggest you take a look at Gadamer's "Truth and Method".

EDIT:

Despite my better judgment, I'm going to try to flesh out this answer a bit.

First: as the original question points out, the "Socrates problem" is not really relevant to the actual question at hand. The "Socrates problem", in the sense of "the problem of the historical Socrates" is quite unusual in that we possess no texts attributed to Socrates, but rather, three distinct reports of him (coming from Plato, Aristophanes, and Xenophon), each of whom had their own polemical purposes. This problem does not apply to the vast majority of philosophers we're interested in, who left texts.

So, the question then becomes one of the interpretation of texts: how do we know when we have interpreted a text "correctly"? Further, what would "correctly" mean in this case: the recovery of authorial intent? The branch of philosophy [*] that these questions belong to is termed 'hermeneutics', and there exists a vast literature on the subject. If one were interested in a historical view, Schleiermacher would be the place to start, but I wouldn't recommend that, for the following reason:

There exists a seminal text in hermeneutics, which stands as the sine qua non for all later work in the field: Truth and Method, by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Attempting to discuss hermeneutics without reference to Gadamer would be like trying to discuss physics without recourse to Newton-- you'd spend half of your time reinventing his vocabulary, even if you wanted to disagree with him.

In short, if questions of interpretation interest you at all, there's not much point in going any further before you have grappled with this text.

Fortunately, it is available in English translation, ubiquitous at libraries, cheap in paperback, and easy to read.

Thus, in my opinion, there is only one answer to your question: take a look at Gadamer's "Truth and Method". When there is a major philosophical text that deals directly with the fundamental problematic underlying your question, there's no other responsible answer than a simple referral to the text in question. And, naturally, if for some reason one is unable to take the time to read the primary text, there are easily available secondary and tertiary resources which are easily found with the knowledge of the author and title of the primary work.

[*] and/or philology, but that's a discussion for another day.

Answer 2

Let's disentangle a few things. The first is Plato's dialogical mode of philosophical exposition, the other is a general problem of historical relativism and the role of criticism-translation in "accessing" the "truth" about an author.

Just in passing let's note that Socrates may well have been a literary invention on the part of Plato; there is certainly little enough evidence of him outside the dialogues -- a few humorous dramas by Plato's contemporaries treating the subject of his enlightening but perhaps "super-literary" work with a bit of ironic humor of their own. At any rate the Socratic problem may not really be as important as the larger and more general question about the accessibility of the truth of the work.

The problem of expression cannot be reduced to interpretation, the search for an origin or fundamental truth; an author may not be the end-all be-all of meaning. There may also be other categories: Deleuze and Guattari suggest there may also be another modality, which they term "free indirect discourse" (examined closely A Thousand Plateaus.) So in both cases we may be chasing a ghost in terms of locating a final truth or meaning to a philosophy or theory or even just an expression; after all, a thing is defined by what it can do, and the truth is that we don't know the limit of a what a concept, a feeling, a perception can do. We are always unlocking new interconnections, unfolding new layers and details and abstractions; the valid interpretation of a philosophers' expressions is particularly problematic in this light, as we are perhaps always seeing them "again for the first time," returning again and again but seeing new senses or depths.

This doesn't mean we are incapable of seeking after the truth of thinkers and their works and theories, on the contrary -- we have to recognize we cannot exhaust the depths of these concepts and expressions, that we don't know what they're capable of. Hence some caution is suggested in taking all this seriously, as I sort of hinted in my own question relating to Socrates (which I really loved your answer to, by the way.)

Answer 3

If you are a causal determinist and you believe that the mind is wholly the product of physical processes, theoretically it should someday be possible to completely access other people's minds and—hooking them up to ours—experience the world exactly as they do. For people who died prior to the invention of this technology, we can only theorize as to what actually was going through their minds. After the invention of this technology, however, finding out what a person was thinking would be as simple as loading up a computer chip.

Honestly though, it is not likely we will need to go that far. It is likely we will integrate our minds with computers (thus making memory easily accessible) long before we develop the technology that bridges the gap between seeing billions of neurons fire and actually having phenomenological experience ("qualia", so to speak).

That's just my prediction, anyway.