That next move starts with Socrates securing Hermogenes’ rejection of out-and-out relativism like that of Protagoras. (See the entry Plato on knowledge in the Theaetetus.) This in turn commits him to the view that things have objective natures independent of how they may appear to us, and that there are objectively determined skills for dealing with them: for example, the right way to cut something is determined, independently of our own subjective preferences, by that thing’s objective natu