I Think Therefore I Haven't a Clue

______by Phillip Adams______

Knowing what you don't know has to be the beginning of knowledge. This isn't to suggest that ignorance is bliss. It isn't. Ignorance is annoying and embarrassing. Not to mention dangerous. But to acknowledge what you don't know is to take the first steps towards intellectual self-improvement.

"When you know a thing to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it: this is knowledge," said Confucius, who many regard as perceptive, in the 6th century BC.

Other voices come crowding in with comments. "Knowledge is power," says Francis Bacon, while the Bible warns that "he that increases knowledge increaseth sorrow". Benjamin Franklin interrupts with "to be proud of knowledge is to be blind with light", while Thomas Fuller butts in with "tis not knowing much, but what is useful, that makes a wise man".

Samuel Johnson can't have enough of it. "All knowledge is of itself some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable that I would not rather know it than not." Yet John F, Kennedy, probably reading a speech written by Arthur Schlesinger, said: "The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds".

For me, the wisest observation was provided by a British scientist, whose name escapes me, an aphorism that should be printed on T-shirts and bumper stickers at a time when our species seems over-excited by its learning-curve. "Data isn't information. Information isn't knowledge. And knowledge isn't wisdom." Ten out of ten, say I...

Writing in Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne said something that verges on the profound: "The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it." Spot on. Once you develop a taste for it, you tend to become insatiable, an intellectual junkie who can't get enough of it, who pigs out on knowing anything and everything, I notice it in the way I can't stop reading. If there isn't a newspaper, I'll read the label on the sauce bottle. And I'll read it while I'm listening to the wireless and, simultaneously, trying to eavesdrop on a conversation. Thus Eve's eating of the apple not only gave knowledge a bad name, but has led to widespread gluttony.

Yet I find myself agreeing with Voltaire that, at the end of the day, all this desperate ingestion of information, this feasting on fact, this ravenous need to know, leads to a strange feeling of emptiness. "The more I read, the more I meditate, and the more I acquire," he wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary, "the more I am able to affirm that I know nothing."

Yet there are those among us who claim that, within moments, human beings will possess GUT and TOE. The former stands for "Grand Unified Theory" and the latter means the "Theory of Everything". Tomorrow or, at the latest, next Thursday, a scientist will write the final formula, the fundamental equation on a blackboard at Oxford or Cambridge or a whiteboard at Harvard or Yale. It will be as elegant as E =MC2 and will have unmasked God or made him redundant. There are others, however, and I count myself among them, who suspect that GUT will turn out to be JAT, or "Just Another Tautology". That the universe will continue to be a wonderful mystery, a cosmic striptease, the dance of the infinity of veils.

Which brings me to someone I've interviewed recently, a philosopher from Tucson, Arizona, called Dr. Ann Kerwin. She's into ignorance in a big way, seeing it as a useful and creative notion. Where knowledge and ignorance are usually portrayed as polar opposites, as dualities, Kerwin sees them as intermingled, symbiotic.

She presented me with what she calls an explorer's guide to ignorance, which takes the form of a sort of map of a strange country. And just as Italy resembles a boot, her country looks suspiciously like a question mark. As you explore its latitudes and longitudes, you come across the following forms of ignorance.

1. The known unknowns. That is, all the thing we know we do not know.

2. The unknown unknowns. That is, all the things we do not know we do not know.

3. Error, or all the things we think we know, but don't.

4. Tacit knowing - all the things we do not know we know.

5. All taboos - or forbidden knowledge.

6. All denial - the things too painful to know which we energetically suppress.

Now let me contribute some variations on the theme. Think of the things you know that are no longer correct - as distinct from errors. These are the areas where knowledge is simply left behind by medical or scientific progress, not becoming wrong so much as insufficiently right. (Isaac Newton's beliefs about the universe can't be described as errors - they represent some of the greatest thoughts in human history -but knowledge has moved on, not mocking but transcending his, containing it.)

Then there's the knowledge that some people claim about the universe that involves notions of deity and the supernatural knowledge that isn't known at all but, rather, felt. In this category, people who say "I know" are really saying 1 believe" or "I have faith". Yet they regard this as the highest form of knowledge, as ineffable.

Kerwin is right that ignorance is a vast and fertile domain, a dynamic source of all learning. So how can we approach our ignorance productively? "With humility, with honesty and wonder, with questioning, humour, relentless scrutiny, with imagination and creativity,"...

Kerwin's... right to point out that ignorance is interdisciplinary, that it exists in all disciplines, in any subject, at all levels.

Believe it or not, Kerwin prepares a curriculum in medical ignorance for the college of medicine at the University of Arizona. Surrounded by medical colleagues, she is billed as "philosopher-in-residence" and runs seminars and clinics on what is not known. Not so people can wallow in ignorance but so they can acknowledge it as a prelude to dealing with it.

"If we knew all, there would be no object, no motive for inquiry," says Kerwin. "No cause to wonder."

Kerwin... [says] that learning presupposes ignorance, that from ignorance stems wondering, questioning, pondering, poetry, fantasy, mystery, intuition, silence, imagination and self-reflection. She sees ignorance as driving research and knowledge, that it is in no way its antithesis or enemy.

You can see her point that the dangers lie in the intellectual censorships of taboos and in the self-censorship of denial. And she's certainly right that there's much to be learned from things such as tacit knowing - the knowledge of the 1 didn't know I had it in me" variety. Because often what distinguishes significant people is the confidence they place in "experience", in intuition or gut response. Yet it is in thattacit knowledge that, it seems to me, a great deal of wisdom resides.

Take my grandfather, long dead, He lived and died in the working class and had virtually no formal education. Yet while he was short on data (to return to my scientist's aphorism) and information and, indeed, on objective knowledge, he was just a wise human being. Somehow he just seemed to know. He particularly seemed to know about human beings. And he had something that many gifted academics lack: judgment. Grandpa reminded me that, at the end of the day, knowledge is proportionate to being. You know in virtue of what you are.

Think about all the things you know you don't know. Be aware that there are things you don't know you don't know. Acknowledge your errors - all the things you think you know but don't, and work to destroy taboos and denials. But take comfort from all the things you don't know you know, in the knowledge that research in neurophysiology and cognitive psychology support the efficacy of tacit powers of learning. Because the more we know about knowing the more we realise that there's more to knowledge than we ever knew. If you know what I mean.

And if you don't, don't worry about it. Confess to ignorance and use it as an aphrodisiac for learning. And take comfort from the fact that there are a lot of people out there who know a great deal, but who can hardly dress themselves in the morning. Not all the idiot savants are in institutions or RainMan.Over the years I've met quite a few who are faculty heads...

While [Kerwin]... teaches her doctors about their medical ignorance, I'd like to see others reminding our politicians about their political ignorance, and our business leaders about their social ignorance. Because what each of us doesn't know what make a great book. In my case, and I suspect in yours, a great library full of great books.

Questions:

  1. What is Phillip Adams saying about our knowledge? How does he support his stance? Explain.
  2. Do you agree with the author? Why or why not? Which parts? Explain.
  3. How does this article relate to the ways of knowing that we have been studying in TOK? How does it relate to our investigation into degrees of certainty? Explain.