CratylusPlato
About Cratylus
A dialogue on the correctness of names. Hermogenes maintains that names are assigned by convention, so that any name is as good as any other once usage has fixed it. Cratylus, a Heraclitean, maintains that names are naturally fitted to their objects, that a thing's true name reveals its nature, and that a wrong name is not a name at all. Socrates enters to mediate.
He first takes up the naturalist side, working through a long and half-serious etymology of the Greek language, deriving the names of gods, virtues, elements, and body parts from hidden descriptive roots. Knowledge, epistēmē, is that which makes the soul follow; body, sōma, is the tomb, sēma, of the soul. The game spirals on for many pages. Socrates then turns on the whole project. If a name is accurate because it pictures its object, then one must already know the object to judge the name; and if the name-giver was mistaken about the object, the whole language descends from that error.
The conclusion is that knowledge must reach the things themselves and cannot rest content with names. The stages, more directly than any other Platonic dialogue, the question of whether language discloses reality or only labels it, and refuses both easy answers.