Plato’s Wax Tablet

Abstract

The writing device Plato employed for his inquiry was a wax tablet. The criticism against writing in the Phaedrus is directed to the wrong use of papyrus scrolls and of the mnemonic technique relying on images planted in the wax tablet of the mind. Plato’s Recollection is not the retrieval of what is stored in the mind, but the construction of cognitive networks through exploration. For this purpose the wax tablet was especially appropriate. Plato’s reflection on it led him to the Wax Block in Part 2 of the Theaetetus and to the Scribe and the Illustrator in the Philebus. The former ends in failure, because it is a block, not a tablet. Another model in Part 2, the Aviary, comes from the image of a library full of papyrus scrolls. It ends in failure, because it takes knowledge to consist in having a bird (an unopened scroll) in hand. What Plato understood as knowledge was the type of comprehension Tiresias the augur had acquired concerning flying patterns of birds, after painstaking observation, using his writing tablet, while for Olympian gods the world itself was such a tablet. Collection and Division is crucial for the approach to this divine ideal. Part 3 of the Theaetetus fails to define knowledge, because it neglects the role of Division.