Saihanjula
Feb.23,99

Placement of The Cognitive Self in Writing Discourse

The fable leaves us two questions hanging, one is "will writing make people wiser?", and the other "will people become forgetful about truth once they mastered writing?" For different schools of thoughts, the answers may vary. For internalists, who hold the idea that truth cannot be created and people know prior to their birth, writing as a methodology has nothing to do with making people wiser; and people will forget truth gradually, thanks to treasuring up reminders by means of writing. For externalists who unite truth, knowledge and meaning, the answers might be the opposite.

Plato believes that truth is transcendental and supernatural, but it is within human cognition, and that language is endowed with the
divine task of aiding people to discover, or to return to truth. Trust in writing, according to the fable, will lead to people's
forgetfulness and discourage the use of one's own memory. Therefore, whether writing can be used to reveal the truth is doubted; it can only remind us of something we already know. 

The fable raises a question to us, "Does writing have a life of its own?" It seems that Plato would think writing is dead, or motionless, once it is finished. The self-focused philosophical nature that mystifies the function of language precludes writing's potential as communicative interaction between the speaker and the reader. According to Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus the presence or absence of the speaker is of crucial importance since the liveliness of discourse is dependent upon its "father" and defender--- the author. In other words, when the writer is absent, as in a piece of writing, the communication with his readers ceases at the point where the writing arrives; when the writer is present as in an oral discourse, the communication with readers goes on and on, and the product's development fully accords with the author's expectation. This explains why Plato thinks oral discourse is nobler than written text due to its flexibility in response. This, however, ignores in the writing discourse situation, the changes of attitudes, values, beliefs and knowledge on the readers' part. For if a reader's response towards a piece of writing is active and develops across time, we can hardly say that the writing is dead. In this sense, I think writing is more in ahibernation that invites stimuli from others' mind to get awake, and its life emerges each time.

The core of externalism is the unity of truth, knowledge and meaning.  According to Kent, internalists consist of three schools, namely, expressivists, cognitivists, social-constructionist, since by definition they all assume that there is a split between subjective experience and objective reality. Plato, who presumes that one knows truth by intuition prior to his birth, shares this internalist feature in that internalism also states that the internal realm of mental states exist anterior to external realm of objects and events.
Therefore, what undermines internalism internally invalidates Platonic beliefs as well. With the preoccupied concern with mind of one's own, where the "real eternal absolute truth" is supposed to be hiding, Plato fails to know with certainty the world or the minds of others.

Since Socrates insists that truth is absolute, and that any variation is "appearance of truth", thus false, conflicts can result from
various individual cognition of the world. "What is the universal truth?" "Who first said that?" "Can we invent definition?" A lot of such questions can be raised, and you may find no answer in Platonic ideas . Even Socrates himself jokingly said at the end of his speech that "perhaps the writer of our treatise will say, 'Phaedrus and Socrates, do you agree to all this? Or must the art of speech be described in some other way?'" (Plato, 138). 

As one form of public discourse, political writing as well as political speaking are denounced by Socrates. Their changefulness, determined by their practical needs, in the eyes of Socrates, doesn't reflect truth. However, the changefulness can be a consequence of public communication, which, in externalists point of view, can lead to knowledge about the world, minds about others and one's own.

Though the externalism that Kent advocates sounds more convincing, it has its deficiencies. Davidson, one of the externalists, believes that the knowledge of our own mind cannot be separated from knowledge of another's mind, and knowledge of the world. In other words, one cannot have mental states if he/she doesn't have interactive communication with others and the world. The cognition of oneself, other's mind, and the world are interrelated. However, the role of one's own mind is underplayed, as Davidson thinks that knowledge of one's own minds are the least important, and it can't lead to knowledge. Just as internalists are absorbed with the concept of self, externalilsts go to the other extreme of denying, or minimizing the constructive role of self. By making the innate mental state identical with that of others' and the world, Kent neglects the private part of individual thinking, which does not and should not belong to the public discourse.