Plato's philosophy of writing

The following comes from "Phaedrus" by Plato:

Socrates. But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing.

Phaedrus. Yes.

Socrates. Do you know how you can speak or act about rhetoric in a manner which will be acceptable to God?

Phaedrus. No, indeed. Do you?

Socrates. I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know; although if we had found the truth ourselves, do you think that we should care much about the opinions of men?

Phaedrus. Your question needs no answer; but I wish that you would tell me what you say that you have heard.

Socrates. At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specificwhich you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Phaedrus. Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country.

Socrates. There was a tradition in the temple of Dodona that oaks first gave prophetic utterances. The men of old, unlike in their simplicity to young philosophy, deemed that if they heard the truth even from "oak or rock," it was enough for them; whereas you seem to consider not whether a thing is or is not true, but who the speaker is and from what country the tale comes.

Phaedrus. I acknowledge the justice of your rebuke; and I think that the Theban is right in his view about letters.

Socrates. He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?

Phaedrus. That is most true.

Socrates. I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

Phaedrus. That again is most true.

Socrates. Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having far greater power -- a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten?

Phaedrus. Whom do you mean, and what is his origin?

Socrates. I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.

Phaedrus. You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image?

Socrates. Yes, of course that is what I mean. And now may I be allowed to ask you a question: Would a husbandman, who is a man of sense, take the seeds, which he values and which he wishes to bear fruit, and in sober seriousness plant them during the heat of summer, in some garden of Adonis, that he may rejoice when he sees them in eight days appearing in beauty? At least he would do so, if at all, only for the sake of amusement and pastime. But when he is in earnest he sows in fitting soil, and practices husbandry, and is satisfied if in eight months the seeds which he has sown arrive at perfection?

Phaedrus. Yes, Socrates, that will be his way when he is in earnest; he will do the other, as you say, only in play.

Socrates. And can we suppose that he who knows the just and good and honourable has less understanding, than the husbandman, about his own seeds?

Phaedrus. Certainly not.

Socrates. Then he will not seriously incline to "write" his thoughts "in water" with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others?

Phaedrus. No, that is not likely.

Socrates. No, that is not likely -- in the garden of letters he will sow and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will write them down as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age, by himself, or by any other old man who is treading the same path. He will rejoice in beholding their tender growth; and while others are refreshing their souls with banqueting and the like, this will be the pastime in which his days are spent.

Phaedrus. A pastime, Socrates, as noble as the other is ignoble, the pastime of a man who can be amused by serious talk, and can discourse merrily about justice and the like.

Socrates. True, Phaedrus. But nobler far is the serious pursuit of the dialectician, who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness.

Phaedrus. Far nobler, certainly.

Random musings

Question: Is a photograph of a document a document?
No, it isn't. A photograph of a boat is not a boat. The photograph can communicate valuable information (e.g. what kind of boat it is, what is its name, how large is it, etc.), but it is not a boat.

Question: Should the definition of a document reference the communication of language?

Document flow

I listed one of the purposes of a document is to communicate information. Therefore, implicit in that is the concept of document flow. It could be as simple as an author writing a document with no input from others, and then sending the document to other people for them to be able to read (e.g. writing / distributing a resume). It could be as complex as a document that is edited by one person who collects information from multiple people, all of whom review each revision, after which a vote is taken to approve the document (e.g. an ISO standard). In either case, the explicit notion that a document is used to communicate information implicitly means that 2 or more people in different capacities will make use of the document, and there will be some relationship in how the document flows between them.

Question: Is it possible to list the common roles that people have in relation to documents?

How should a person (in the context of the previous paragraph) be defined? One possible use case for a document is for a person to record information that he doesn't necessarily intend to share with others, but will use himself at a later time (e.g. a diary). In this case, one way to look at it is that the person is communicating information to himself at a later time (i.e. it's an extension of his memory). In one sense, there really are 2 users of the document in this case: person A at time 1 and person A at time 2. I think it's appropriate to define a specific term to capture this concept; for lack of imagination, I'll call it User (capitalized).

What is a document

A document is an entity used to record and communicate information visually between people. Examples of things that can be considered documents:

• A piece of paper with English writing on it
• An email
• A software bug report
  
• The Rosetta Stone
• A magazine article
• An instruction manual
• A novel

With the above definition of a document, the following could also be considered a document. Should they?

• A photograph
• A TV show
• A silent movie
  

Generally, these are not considered documents because they don't consist of writing. But what about a photograph of the Rosetta Stone? In addition, what separates a photograph of a product for a catalog from a powerpoint slide with a pie chart? Neither has writing. The latter is considered a document, should the former?

Some defining characteristics of a document:

• A document can convey it's information across space and time easily. Any document in electronic form can be sent over the Internet quickly and for near zero cost. A physical document can be sent via mail or delivery service relatively cheaply. Documents of all forms can last 10s to 1000s of years, and most importantly, can outlast the author.
  
• Documents can be copied. For most forms of documents, an exact copy can be made quickly and cheaply.
  

Kickoff

I use Microsoft Office a lot. One of the things that bugs me about it is how different each of the apps are. For example, in Word, you have paragraph styles that you can apply to paragraphs of text. No such thing exists in OneNote. In Excel, it's quite difficult to even format the font.

Another thing that bothers me is how un-integrated the applications are. When you begin a new document, you have to pick which application / document type to create. Later, if you decide you picked incorrectly, or need the same information in multiple formats, there's no easy (i.e. automated) way to change. Sure there's OLE to embed one document in another, but it doesn't change the fact that you're embedding one document type into another.

The purpose of this blog is to brainstorm about documents and the applications used to create them. I think there must be a better way, and I aim to find it.

I'm calling this blog Document Theory. I chose the name because I intend to explore the purpose of documents, how they're used, how they compare to other forms of communication, etc., and to me, this name fits very well with that purpose. Perhaps the name is inspired somewhat by current fashion (e.g. Constraint Theory), and seems a little lofty and academic, but I don't care.

I think this exploration is fundamental to understanding how we can build better applications that automate document creation (which fundamentally is what Office is, after all).