Plato's Problem with Authorities

James Paul Gee is a writer and researcher who has spent time working in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy. He is the author of Social Linguistics and Literacies in which he spends much of the book researching discourses and how people acquire and use them within society. Gee also introduces Plato's dilemma regarding writing and how authorities can kill a text in his book. He discusses, acknowledging, "There have been many facile attempts to get out of Plato’s dilemma: the dilemma that literacy seems to require some authority that determines what interpretations count (or all count and there is no meaning), but that authority can be self-interested and kill dialogue. But there is no easy way out (Gee 53)." Plato despised writing; he believed that writing would hinder one's memory and kill a conversation. He believed that without a discussion, writing would take out any aspect of discussion and could easily be misinterpreted. His answer to this would be to establish a single authority to interpret texts, to figure out their meaning. The problem with a single authority is that they can be self-interested and interpret texts to only promote their ideas.


Further reading on James Paul Gee.