Students Often Think the Forms Must Be Merely Ideas or Concepts

Students often think the Forms must be merely ideas or concepts in an individual's mind. To counter that tendency, you might point out that when Socrates thought of a square, there was indeed an idea of a square in his mind, but that he wasn't thinking about that idea: (a) he used that idea to pick out what he was thinking about; (b) it makes no sense to think of ideas as square; and (c) ideas cannot be doubled in size, but squares can.