Donald Rumsfeld attracted unfair opprobrium over his ‘known unknowns’ speech – which is not to say that much of the opprobrium he attracted elsewhere was unjustified.
There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know.
But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.
Emphases added by me.
It strikes me that there is a fourth category – unknown knowns*. I am increasingly aware that people in one part of an organisation can know something – and not just know it, but have a developed view on it and how it affects other things – but that other parts of the organisation, particularly towards the top, don’t know that another part of the organisation knows.
xD.
* – That is not Zizek’s definition:
the “unknown knowns” – the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to known about, even though they form the background of our public values
These are ‘rejected knowns’ and I’m taking the semantic route out as I would say that people still know about these things, even if they ignore them