Childish Nonsense? The Value of Interpretation in Plato’s Protagoras

In the Protagoras, Plato presents us with a puzzle about interpretation. Socrates claims to find several familiar Socratic theses about morality in his interpretation of a poem by Simonides, yet, immediately afterwards, he castigates interpretation itself as “childish nonsense.” In this paper, I argue that the puzzle can be resolved if we understand Socrates’s interpretation of Simonides’s poem to be a parody, which articulates implicit criticisms of sophistic interpretation. The parodic criticisms rely on an ideal of interpretation, what I call philosophical interpretation, whereby an interpreter remains indifferent to the authority of the poet, attempts a plausible reconstruction of the poem so that a philosophical view is formulated, and critically assesses this view. However, this ideal of interpretation can only partly escape the explicit criticisms Socrates voices against interpretation, and it thus has only limited value due to a contingent relation to truth.