WHAT IS "I don't know!"

  1. when reason is exhausted and the mind tells iteslf “I don’t know” what do you call that mode of thought?

  2. why is the intellectual “I dont know” a frustrating mental block, when the eastern widsom version of “I don’t know” is revered?

  3. What can one do with “I dont know”? Keep digging? Does one have any other choice but to keep digging (reasoning until recognized failure)

  4. How would you write a logical equation for such a phrase as “I dont know”?

  5. The question signifying words, such as, who-what-where-when-why, even the question mark itself, how are they any different from the end result of “I dont know”?

I once heard a buddhist speech about the diffence between intellectual pursuits and the path of wisdom. For those intellectuals, reason could be compared to throwing a rock at a dog; the dog would chase the rock. The path of wisdom, however, was compared to throwing a rock at a lion. The lion would chase the person who threw the rock.

What does the person who threw the rock symbolize to you?

I think this is more of an anthropological question than philosophical. It does seem that in the western world we pride ourselves more on what we think we know than on what we might find out.

One can do whatever one wants with “I don’t know.” It seems like it would depend on the topic. “I don’t know how to fry an egg.” I can keep digging until I find the answer, and then I can say “I know how to fry an egg.” But “I don’t know what lies beyond the universe” is a different sort of problem. No amount of digging is going to answer that question. One can continue to ponder it, and propose theories, but knowledge won’t come of that. “I don’t know” in that sense is definitive in itself.

Well, The questions signified by the words you mentioned would lead one to believe that there is something that the speaker knows. He knows what happened but not by whom, or where it happened, but not when. Since “I don’t know” on it’s own doesn’t refer to anything at all, it might be no different from those words. ex: “I heard the explosion, but I don’t know where it was.”

“I don’t know” on it’s own doesn’t hold any more philosophical significance than “I remember” or “I forgot” or “I like vanilla ice cream.”
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Unfed wonder.

…Maybe because of the way a word is used.
Humans tend to judge things by the how, not the what.

Depends upon the strength of compulsion.

“I want something to satisfy my judgment of truth, which I have not yet found.”

There are many classes of expectation which can be met or unmet.

Its simple. I dont know is a statement of truth. You lack the knowledge to answer a specific question. Do YOU know how many grains of sand there are in the world? I dont know either!

Of the three responses, all seemed vaild enough.

What I think I was getting at, may have been, is there a statement that follows “I dont know” but is yet to arrive at truth. A higher mode in logical thinking.

Is “I dont know” a final stumbling block, or can there be a lateral movement in thought, that may better satisfy the speakers curiousity.

To clarify, I am talking about limits of knowledge, not how to fry an egg.

I should have made the aim of this thread clear: is there a way to transend the “I don’t know” phrase. Eastern philosophy seems to handle it gracefully, but can this be possible in the reason/intellectual realm? #-o

“I could know so much more, potentially.”

That’s the realization which sparks the other set of words.

Hey Kevconman,

If I were to tell you that I understand how a can-opener works, in a sense, it’s obvious that I’m lying. Isn’t it?

Sure, I can explain how the serrated cutter is wedged into the top of the can. I could go further and explain the metallurgy of the iron-carbon relationship of the steels involved. And I could go even further and talk about the properties of the various elements having to do with their valence electrons. And then I could drone-on about the forces at work on the atomic scale. But there would come a link in the explanation, beyond which even the great, Richard Feynman, would have had to fall silent.

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Carl Sagen

Even in a supposedly causal world, non-tautological statements of commonplace knowledge attest only to the last few causal links in the chain; a hypothetical chain of links that extends back to a mythical origin. I say, “mythical origin” because Leibniz’ so-called “Principle of Sufficient Reason” is, metaphysically speaking, theological. Causa finalis is a term introduced by the medieaval scholastics. The other end of this hypothetical, causal-chain linking the can-opener is ultimately left dangling. Theologians want to plug the dangling end into their God. What they misunderstand is that their God, at best, adds but one more link to the chain. In that case, it’s their God that gets left doing the dangling.

But let’s back away from this endless causal chain and make a few distinctions. Of course, there’s a distinction to be made between “knowing that” and “knowing how.” Obviously, knowing how to play the violin doesn’t imply a physical understanding of how horsehair elicits sound from catgut. But what am I saying when I tell you that I know how a can-opener works? Am I attesting to infinite understanding? Obviously not. Knowing is relational. The fact that I know how a can-opener works only stands in relation to a man who hasn’t a clue of how a can-opener works.

“Content requires contingency. To learn something, to acquire information, is to rule out possibilities.” Robert Stalnaker, Inquiry, 1984

To set human knowledge in relation to theological omniscience is to commit a blunder. Derrida diagnosed the blunder as logocentricism. Knowledge is a salient riding not under a sea of certainty but upon a sea of ignorance. To view it the other way around is to peer through the wrong end of the telescope.

Music, analogously, doesn’t depend on the existence of some hypothetically perfect tune, instead, it’s set against a background of noise. Noise is less interesting than music because it’s less predictable. And yet obvious and predictable tunes are boring as hell. Music is a balance between the random and the obvious, rather than the random and the perfect.

Non-tautological knowledge doesn’t require some hypothetical, metaphysically warranted certitude. Knowledge consists in discarding exformation. There is necessarily more information in disorder than in order. Disorder is the complex sea of “noise” against which our simple knowledge is set. Non-tautological human knowledge is not placed between ignorance and certainty, rather, it’s between ignorance and the bounds of knowing.

I, having built a house, reject
The feud of eye and intellect,
And find in my experience proof,
One pleasure runs from root to roof,
One thrust along a streamline arches
The sudden star, the budding larches.

The force that makes the winter grow
Its feathered hexagons of snow,
And drives the bee to match at home,
Their calculated honeycomb,
Is abacus and rose combined.
An icy sweetness fills my mind,

A sense that under thing and wing,
Lies, taut yet living, coiled, the spring.

Jacob Bronowski, The Abacus and the Rose

Best,
Michael

Michael,

The music you mentioned, set against a background of noise, did illustrate for me the range one might expect of knowledge. Funny how comparisons will do just the right job.

When reading your post, I was all-the-time thinking to myself how much learning we do in order to prove that a boundry still does exist. We oscillate. Try as I may, I cannot think of any thought, feeling, or belief, that I keep as a constant. Inconsistency is the constant for me. Perhaps others, as well. I am swinging from ignorance to the bounds of knowledge, and maybe in the middle, someone tells me Boston plays better baseball than New York, and I must only listen for the sound of their conviction. This signals to me a meaningless thought process. Then I read the abacus and the rose and a relief comes to me quick enough.

For me, that type of relief is like having faith, when believing in nothing in particular. Okay, maybe a force or two.

thanks for the response.

As Always,
Kev