Unknown knowns
A zen master once observed that in this world there are three categories of knowledge: known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
Known knowns are the things we know we know - for instance that a triangle has three sides, that the grass is green, that Saskatoon is in Saskatchewan (at least as of this writing).
Known knowns are the things we know we know - for instance that a triangle has three sides, that the grass is green, that Saskatoon is in Saskatchewan (at least as of this writing).
Known unknowns are the things we know we don't know - for instance, who will win the election, or whether it will rain next Tuesday, or whether she really wants you to kiss her.
Unknown unknowns are the things we don't know we don't know - the vast and unfathomable category of things beyond our ken, which constitutes more or less the whole of existence.
But there is a fourth category which the master excluded from his theory of human knowledge: unknown knowns. He presumably omitted this because he had ruled it out as an impossibility; it would, after all, be paradoxical to suggest that we can know something without knowing it. And yet...
We do it all the time. Indeed, this is one of the great, tragic verities of the human condition: failing to recognize what is right before our eyes; failing to connect the dots despite the fact that each dot is fully obvious in itself. As Orwell once put it: "to see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
The truth is that people are highly paradoxical in many ways. One of those ways is that they are often blinded to the things they do know by things that they don't know - by ideas, suppositions, fears, prejudices, hopes, dreams, wishful thinking, cockamamie theories and harebrained schemes, fantasies about tax cuts increasing revenues or tinpot dictators possessing weapons of mass destruction.
We do it all the time. Indeed, this is one of the great, tragic verities of the human condition: failing to recognize what is right before our eyes; failing to connect the dots despite the fact that each dot is fully obvious in itself. As Orwell once put it: "to see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
The truth is that people are highly paradoxical in many ways. One of those ways is that they are often blinded to the things they do know by things that they don't know - by ideas, suppositions, fears, prejudices, hopes, dreams, wishful thinking, cockamamie theories and harebrained schemes, fantasies about tax cuts increasing revenues or tinpot dictators possessing weapons of mass destruction.
The problem is not ignorance; it is the failure to recognize or admit ignorance. Aside from sheer, deliberate malevolence, the greatest harm in human affairs derives from the illusion of certitude.