Life consists of three states of knowledge: the known, which is usual, like a familiar story; the unknown, like a fresh or novel insight in a story; or an unknown unknown, where you can’t grasp what the story is about.
Language is rich with ways to describe states in time. Tenses are provided that are deeply placed in the structure of sentences. There are sentences in the present, past and future tense and there are also the historical past tense and the subjunctive tense. There are combinations of words to elaborate even further as when it is said that something “could have been”, which is to say something that might have occurred in the past but did not. Which is a subtle description of a condition in time. On the other hand, language has simpler and unelaborated ways of describing kinds of being which are not inflected by time. What is relied on are straightforward assertions, as when Donald Rumsfeld, rhapsodizing about the war on Iraq before it was discovered that there were no weapons of mass destruction, said there were knowns, unknowns and unknown unknowns, the last of the three meaning categories which themselves are unknown. I want to elaborate this obvious three part and well known distinction to apply to a number of actual cases so as to illuminate the actual subject matters that are encountered in everyday life.
Existence itself can fall into these three categories.There are things that exist and so can be known. Bertrand Russell went so far as to hold the absolutist and quite controversial view that the only meaningful propositions were those that referred to things that existed. If the proposition was untrue, it was fanciful or merely gobbledegook, like speaking of a squared circle.Sydney Morgenbesser thought that “symbolic meanings” in literature were gobbledegook because either a meaning was either said or implied rather than “found in literature”, whatever that might seem to mean. Most philosophers will not go so far. After all, it is not incoherent to think that there might be unicorns or a lost continent of Atlantis which are unknown except as an idea but are certainly possible. And there are people who assert that things that are not possible are regarded as the most essential and important beings such as when people say they know of and even communicate with God even though they can’t provide a definition of God, only a metaphor for being a lord and master and having a voice or something like that rather than what He is. What He is is a known unknown and people live and die by that. An unknown unknown would be the Big Bang before it was discovered and what happened before the Big Bang happened.
Turn from a metaphysical issue to some sociological topics that are illuminated by referring to the three kinds of being. Careers are an aspect of choice that are available to three dispensations. There are known careers in that the options are clear and are characteristic of working class people who would leave school and the next day join the factory or the mine and stay there for the rest of their working lives. There is a second career where the outcome is unknown because engaging in it is chancy, as when a poor boy decides to become a doctor or a lawyer or a nuclear physicist and it might not work out and if it does the achievement deserves plaudits. And there are unknown unknown careers as happens when people reinvent careers as when Freud developed psychoanalysis or develop whole new careers which did not previously have names, such as a “life coach”. It is brave to take money for that and other people see such people as charlatans.
Courtship is an emotionally very powerful subject matter to which the three kinds of being apply. People can marry people who they know are socially acceptable, such as people within an ethnic group or within a social class whether or not that is done via matchmakers or web sites or family gatherings. You know who they are and the group knows it even if there is free choice among those acceptable people. Then there are people you might think about courting even though tey are people forbidden by social means to marry. So Charlotte Bronte can imagine a fantasy about a poor girl catching Lord Rochesterr and that in Edith Wharton’s in “The House of Mirth“ believing the female protagonist can hook a respectable and wealthy man because she is beautiful even though she lives on the edges of the wealthy. These are known unknowns in that such a match is questionable both in fact and to be overcome despite disapproval, like Romeo and Juliet and David and Bathsheba. Then there are the third kind of courtships which involve engaging with people a person cannot even aspire to but are forbidden, not even allowed to think about. Lolita is one of these as well as the young women who got involved with Jeffrey Epstein. The courtship doesn’t just face hurdles. It is morally unthinkable even if people think about it in private. This is Freudian territory which concerns family members which sociologists once thought of as a necessary and universal taboo, though Cleopatra did wed her brother. But breaking that taboo is the establishment of social anarchy. It is and symbolizes entering into not knowing what isn’t known because it is so foreign to social discourse.
The three kinds of being can be reduced to three social activities which guide the reading of books.. What is known is also what is understood as customary. It is customary to know that the Old Testament is full of a vengeful god and a lot of warfare because that is what you have been told is what is there though it is no more brutal than the Iliad and the New Testament is pretty brutal in saying only people who accept Jesus will get salvation though that can be reinterpreted to mean that salvation is just being transformed into a follower of Christian ethics and so salvation means just being nice to people. Texts are funny in that people know them through those who tell what is in there rather than attending to the words that are said and the same can be said of all talk in that what you know as known in that it is confirmed by others. Reading on its own is a lonely activity.
The second activity in reading is considered an adventure in that a person departs from the ordinary to test their abilities in what might be a strange way as happens in “Sir Gewain and the Green Knight” where the test of being a worthy knight consists of being courtly to a woman rather than engaging in derring do. So there are known unknowns such as a roller coaster where you may get frightened and queasy or trying an occupation to which you may or may not be suited to see if you may succeed, knowing that this is an adventure rather than a happenstance. Then there are unknown adventures which simply mean a puzzling event not meant as a test unless as in the Henry James story, “The Beast in the Jungle”, where the hero does not know he is tested but is told years later that he had failed and there was no recourse, which seems a cruel way of events and suggests to James that life is cruel because so many things happen that can be regarded as tests without knowing them to be so, like losing a love without knowing it or making a mistake in what career path to follow, not aware that the decision was a mistake, having missed a calling, many years later. Call the missing of opportunities without knowing it is not an adventure but simply the muddle of life where people pursue life through a glass darkly and so is an unknowing of what is the task to be done, failure and success, which is a competition and adventure, and so a very dismal account of the human condition. The same experience of an unknown unknown happens when you read a book or see a painting where you can’t make head or tails about what it is about, neither a convention or a surprise discovery, as happens when people don’t get Kafka or Rothko.
The three epistemological states can be reduced to three sociological situations, which means what they operationally mean. When something is said to be known, it can mean it is certain, which means that the consensus of experts think it is true, as when people think the world is more or less round. The consensus can be incorrect, as when doctors said for a while that Covid could be spread on surfaces but that was the reliable version because it was a proposition offered by those charged with being in the know. To think otherwise is a surprise and to change a view adopted by consensus shows malignant intent, as was leveled against Dr. Fauci when he shifted positions when more became known about Covid.
Things that are said to be unknown, on the other hand, are matters of contention, there being a difference of opinion between large numbers of experts. It is no surprise that there are disputations as when people argued about how many angels were on the head of a pin because there was disagreement about whether angels took up space or when political scientists disagree about which party will win the next election or whether the dinosaurs were ended by the arrival on Earth of a meteor though there has been a building consensus that such was the fact. And the claim that there are unknown unknowns means practically that a new subject matter is to be observed, such as microbes, or a new theory which is developed from an ingenious thinker like Copernicus or Darwin though in retrospect a number of people were on the verge of arriving at the same thing and so a new consensus was arrived at quickly, in a generation for evolution but not by the Catholic Church for the rotation of the Earth around the sun until, belatedly, the twentieth century. The Catholic Church prelates were sticks in the mud in that they lagged so far behind the consensus as to be thought therefore surprising.
Whether a kind of knowledge is to be thought of as one rather than another of the three kinds of knowledge can be quite contentious. In my youth, there was a general consensus of what constituted genocide. The Holocaust was one and so was the killing or starvation of the kulaks under Stalin and also the slaughter within Rwanda during the Clinton Administration. But nowadays “”genocide” is controversial, some seeing what the Israelis were doing in Gaza as genocide while Israel sympathizers thought otherwise. Someone will identify some new social phenomenon, give it a new word, and so discover an unknown unknown for wars that seem disproportionate in their aims though I can’t make clear what that would be because World War II was extremely violent in that the sides thought civilization was at stake. If the United States had won a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, the Cold War going hot, would that have been a genocide or something new under the sun, perhaps best referred to as an apocalypse, as in “Revelations” and so designated in many apocalyse movies? New words are needed or old words refashioned for new events.