Usage
| “ | 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. |
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—United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld |
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The above statement was made by Rumsfeld on February 12, 2002 at a press briefing where he addressed the absence of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. It was criticised as an abuse of language by, among others, the Plain English Campaign. However, linguist Geoffrey Pullum disagreed, saying the quotation was "completely straightforward" and "impeccable, syntactically, semantically, logically, and rhetorically."
As for the substance of his statement, Rumsfeld's defenders have included Canadian columnist Mark Steyn, who called it "in fact a brilliant distillation of quite a complex matter", and Australian economist and blogger John Quiggin, who wrote, "Although the language may be tortured, the basic point is both valid and important ... Having defended Rumsfeld, I’d point out that the considerations he refers to provide the case for being very cautious in going to war." Moreover, one may criticize Rumsfeld's statement for omitting the most dangerous type of unknown: the "unknown known". That is, as Josh Billings famously expressed it, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you think you know that just ain't so". Indeed, Rumsfeld was really discussing an "unknown known" which provided faulty justification for the war—members of the Bush administration claimed that the Iraqi government possessed weapons of mass destruction (see Rationale for the Iraq War), but it just wasn't so.
His comment earned him the 2003 Foot in Mouth Award.
Italian economists Salvatore Modica and Aldo Rustichini provide an introduction to the economic literature on awareness and unawareness:
| “ | A subject is certain of something when he knows that thing; he is uncertain when he does not know it, but he knows he does not: he is consciously uncertain. On the other hand, he is unaware of something when he does not know it, and he does not know he does not know, and so on ad infinitum: he does not perceive, does not have in mind, the object of knowledge. The opposite of unawareness is awareness. | ” |
Psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek extrapolates from these three categories a fourth, the unknown known, that which we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know:
| “ | If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the "unknown unknowns," that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the "unknown knowns" – the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values. | ” |
Žižek also builds the ideas of known unknowns, and unknown knowns, into a lecture on The Reality of the Virtual and a lecture on Architecture and aesthetics.
The term unknown unknowns was in use within the United States aerospace and military communities long before Rumsfeld's quote to the press in 2002. As early as 1969, Fortune magazine ran an article highlighting 'Unk-Unk' as an abbreviation used at Lockheed for 'unknown unknown'. An earlier use of the term in a military context comes from a 1984 paper about warfare:
| “ | To those things Clausewitz wrote about uncertainty and chance, I would add a few comments on unknown unknowns – those things that a commander doesn't even know he doesn't know. Participants in a war game would describe an unknown unknown as unfair, beyond the ground rules of the game. But real war does not follow ground rules, and I would urge that games be "unfair" by introducing unknown unknowns. | ” |
Around the same time, libertarian lawyer Richard Epstein wrote a well known article in the University of Chicago Law Review about the American labour law doctrine of employment at will (the idea that workers can be fired without warning or reason, unless their contract states otherwise). In giving some of his reasons in defense of the contract at will, he wrote this:
| “ | The contract at will is also a sensible private adaptation to the problem of imperfect information over time. In sharp contrast to the purchase of standard goods, an inspection of the job before acceptance is far less likely to guarantee its quality thereafter. The future is not clearly known. More important, employees, like employers, know what they do not know. They are not faced with a bolt from the blue, with an "unknown unknown." Rather they face a known unknown for which they can plan. The at-will contract is an essential part of that planning because it allows both sides to take a wait-and-see attitude to their relationship so that new and more accurate choices can be made on the strength of improved information. | ” |
The expression was used more recently, in 2005, in the context of risk and reliability:
| “ | NASA space exploration should largely address a problem class in reliability and risk management stemming primarily from human error, system risk and multi-objective trade-off analysis, by conducting research into system complexity, risk characterization and modeling, and system reasoning. In general, in every mission we can distinguish risk in three possible ways: a) known-known, b) known-unknown, and c) unknown-unknown. It is probable, almost certain, that space exploration will partially experience similar known or unknown risks embedded in the Apollo missions, Shuttle or Station unless something alters how NASA will perceive and manage safety and reliability. | ” |
In his 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells of a presentation on uncertainty he was requested to give to the United States Department of Defense shortly before Rumsfeld's speech. The core message of the Black Swan is that unknown unknowns are responsible for the greatest societal change.
Rumsfeld used the quote in the title of his autobiography Known and Unknown: A Memoir.
In a 2010 Washington Times interview, Admiral James A. Winnefeld, Jr., commander of the United States Northern Command, said that he was most worried about "the unknown unknowns."
Read more about this topic: Unimaginatively
Famous quotes containing the word usage:
“Girls who put out are tramps. Girls who don’t are ladies. This is, however, a rather archaic usage of the word. Should one of you boys happen upon a girl who doesn’t put out, do not jump to the conclusion that you have found a lady. What you have probably found is a lesbian.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1951)
“Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates—but pages
Might be filled up, as vainly as before,
With the sad usage of all sorts of sages,
Who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore!
The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“...Often the accurate answer to a usage question begins, “It depends.” And what it depends on most often is where you are, who you are, who your listeners or readers are, and what your purpose in speaking or writing is.”
—Kenneth G. Wilson (b. 1923)