Plato And The Aviary Theory

In the Theaetetus, Plato is troubled by the problem of false beliefs and wants to show that Protagoras is incorrect to claim that falsehood is impossible. Plato therefore must prove that is it possible to have false beliefs and that our judgements sometimes fail to refer to the objects of their consideration. In other words, he needs to show that false judgement can occur and that one person can judge falsely, and another truly (187E6-10). In trying to accomplish this, Socrates proposes the Aviary model as the final attempt to explain the failure of the wax model and to account for false belief that arises when a person mismatches an imprint with another imprint. This paper takes the position that the Aviary model’s lack of success failure …show more content…
The Aviary model focuses on what a person knows—something that they have and do not have. Whereas the Wax Tablet model focuses on what they perceive meaning what a person knows is something they have and matches it up with something else. A person can possess a piece of knowledge, storing it in their mind as a memory, and yet not have it at the same time, that is, not having that piece of knowledge before the mind. The chance of false belief is now based on two different ways of relating to what one knows rather than on two different kinds of knowing, memory and perception. According to the model the mind resembles an aviary full of birds where the possessing of knowledge is comparable to a person who possesses birds in a cage (197C) where different birds represent different pieces of knowledge flying around in the aviary. A person has the power to activate any one of these pieces of knowledge by grasping one of the birds from their cage. In the same sense the person who possesses knowledge has the power to grasp pieces of knowledge and have it in hand. Based on the distinction between having and possessing knowledge, Socrates states false belief happens when a person seizes the wrong piece of stored knowledge. A person who possesses a …show more content…
He suggests that pieces of ignorance as well as pieces of knowledge are contained in the aviary. A mistake or false judgment happens when a person reaches in and seizes a piece of ignorance; thereby judges falsely by seizing the wrong bird (199E). The obvious problem is if both ignorance birds and knowledge birds are flying around in the aviary and a person grabs an ignorance bird, thinking it is a knowledge bird; effectively the person would be mistaking something known for something known, something unknown for something known, or something unknown for something unknown (200B1-8). Thus, it raises the absurdity of having in the aviary knowledges of knowledges and ignorances (200C10-11). The suggestion fails to produce a satisfactory definition of knowledge that allows for the possibility of false