In the allegory, Plato describes people that have spent their lives chained in a cave facing a blank wall.
They watch shadows projected onto the wall by objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and they give names to these shadows.
The shadows are the prisoners’ reality but not accurate representations of the real world.
The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses,
While the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason.
Three higher levels exist:
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natural science;
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deductive mathematics, geometry, and logic;
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the theory of forms