  The top-most segment of Line is clear enough. The objects are Forms and the faculty set over Forms is Nous, Knowledge or Understanding. Included in this group is the Good itself, best regarded as having the status of first among equals. Precisely what to make of the objects in the third section, the faculty of dianoia, and the nature of hypotheses are matters of great controversy. Given Plato's examples, the capacity of dianoia seems distinctive of scientific or mathematical reasoning. (On the question of hypotheses and the relation of this passage to the hypothetical method of the Phaedo, see §15 supra.) The objects of dianoia are then, roughly, the objects of the sciences. There appear to be two basic approaches to the ‘objects’ of dianoia, depending on how one understands the participial phrase “using as images the things that were imitated before”: 1) The objects of this segment are some kind of ‘abstract’ image of ordinary material things - a kind of image different from the kind that are shadows and reflections; or 2) the objects are either the material objects themselves though now treated (abverbially, as it were) in a special, different way, or they are Forms, though treated in a way different from that way in which noûs treats Forms (see Burnyeat 1987).