system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
In Plato's dialogues, do you think we should read Socrates as a stand-in for Plato, or should we read the frames of the story (along with their "mimetic irony" according to Mitchell Miller [1986]) as Plato's point-of-view?

I generally have trouble with critics who attribute Plato's world view to Socrates. Also, I'm merely thinking aloud and wanted to have a conversation (i.e., I'm not writing a paper for a class, as I'm a faculty member [but not in philosophy]).
gpt
The single greatest piece of evidence for the view that Plato's thoughts are being expressed through the main character of any given dialogue (Socrates, Timaeus, the Eleatic Stranger, etc.) is that everyone who knew Plato personally specifically said that they were his views. Aristotle, for example, spent decades with Plato, and Aristotle doesn't just attribute the ideas in the dialogues to Plato, he often tells us in no uncertain terms how Plato arrived at the views in question (for example, he spent time with Pythagoras as a youth). You can read more about this in Aristotle's *Metaphysics*, book 1, book 13, and book 14.

Of course, Aristotle isn't our only source on the matter. Speusippus and Xenocrates were two contemporaries of Plato, and they each became heads of Plato's Academy. They also treated the views in the dialogues as Plato's own, and they knew him personally. 


One quick edit: it's a testament to Plato's literary achievement that we can read the dialogues in a number of ways, one of which is to forget about Plato-the-author when we read them. Doing so is exactly like reading a book without taking into account the author. That's possible (and rewarding). But consider the following question: did Plato believe what he wrote? It seems that the evidence is hard to deny: he did.