Allegory of the Cave vs. 12 Angry Men
In “Allegory of the Cave”, Plato explains that if you chain a man to a wall where he can’t move his head or any other part of his body while there is a fire behind him with people walking around holding things, he will eventually start to believe the shadows are reality instead of a falsehood. He then continues to explain that if you turn the man around and show him what was really behind him, he will not believe the reality but instead believe the falsehood of the shadows which he convinced himself to be reality, this being called fallibility.
Fallibility is defined as being able to be misled. Plato further explains that if you take the guy out of the cave and into the real world, the reality of the world will slowly and with great difficulty hit him, but he will slowly accept reality instead of the shadows he had taken to be the true forms of life. What if he would go back in the cave then and try to explain that the shadows are not a reality but instead a falsehood.
Fallibility also shows up in 12 Angry Men when the prosecutors try to form the evidence and testimonies into making it seem like the young boy was guilty of murdering his father when he really wasn’t. In 12 Angry Men, a group of jurors are presented with a case in which a child is accused of murdering his father, and all evidence presented seems to indicate this to be true. It seems the jurors are set on deciding him to be guilty, but one juror does not give consent, and questions the case. Through deliberation, the jurors change mindset and see that the child could easily be not guilty.
Only after much deliberation and argument, they all decide him not to be guilty. Had that one juror not stuck with his gut feeling and voted not guilty, causing the rest of them to deliberate, that young boy would’ve been sent off to die. This issue of deliberation also pops up in “Allegory of the Cave” when the man would go back into the cave and try to explain to the others that the shadows are not reality. They would not deliberate with him about it and in turn believe the fallibility of the shadows being their reality.
