All I Know Is That I Know Nothing
The 4 Forms of Knowledge
The Socratic paradox, “I know one thing: that I know nothing,” is a well-known saying derived from Plato’s account of the Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. However, the phrase is not one that Socrates himself is ever recorded as saying, and it could be argued that it is not wholly accurate. Anyone who has spent time as a student, knows that it is definitely true that the deeper you probe into topics you thought you were familiar with, the more you realise how little you actually know about them. Despite this, I don’t think it is correct to say that all we can know is that we know nothing. In fact, I would argue that there are four distinct kinds of knowledge:
There are things you know you know;
things you know you don’t know;
things you don’t know you don’t know, and;
things you don’t know you knew.
The first two are straight forward. From the moment we are born, we embark on a life-long learning journey and all the things we actively learn along this path become the things we know we know. By its nature, this means that we continuously encounter unknowns, the things we then realise we know we don’t know. The challenge, of course, is to tackle that what we don’t know and transform it into something we know.
The third form of knowledge, the things we don’t know we don’t know, harks back to former US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld who, at a U.S. Department of Defence news briefing in 2002, said:
There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
It’s not hard to see that not knowing that we don’t know something is a problem. We can learn the things we don’t know, but if we are completely unaware something even exists, we will be vulnerable. Although Rumsfeld is most famous for mentioning this, he was not quite the first to notice it. Chapter 71 of the Daodejing reads, “Knowing that you do not know is the best. Not knowing that you do not know is an illness.” To avoid this illness, we should make sure we stay open for new experiences, actively search them out and dare to fail.
Finally the fourth form of knowledge, which I find the most interesting one, the idea that there are things we don’t know we know. It was introduced by the Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek in reaction to Rumsfeld’s comments. Žižek’s rather dark interpretation of the unknown knowns is that they are those things we do know, but intentionally refuse to acknowledge. My own interpretation is a bit more uplifting.
Some years ago a student of mine, preparing herself for an interview with a scholarship committee, came to me wanting to know what kind of questions she could expect during the selection interview. As I wasn’t part of the selection committee, I told her that I didn’t know what questions she would be asked, but to help her prepare as best as she could, I gave her the questions I would have asked her if I would have been part of the committee. After she’d had her interview she came running up to me, thanking me profusely for giving her the exact interview questions so she was fully prepared. This was not the case though, I really didn’t know the questions, but it seems that this was a case of not knowing I knew something.
Everything around us is interconnected. This means that everything you know will somehow relate to what you don’t know. By actively exploring your knowns and searching for their connections to unknowns (i.e., the things you know you don’t know, not the unknown unknowns), you will find out that there are a lot of things that you didn’t know you knew.
To sum up, explore what you know, learn what you don’t know and discover what you didn’t know you knew!
[T]here you are.
