Knowing that we do not know; knowing how we do not know

When working in the humanities, it is easy to develop a certain instinctive response to the various forms in which we encounter a widespread, deep-rooted and pernicious distrust and even dismissal of the values of the sundry fields that belong to the humanities umbrella. This antagonism has a long lineage, but its contemporary variants manifest in contemporary ways: defunding of academic institutions, inflation in grades, outright hostility against expertise, and, perhaps most subtly but also most commonly, a combination of enthusiasm about the topic but a rejection of those who have dedicated years of study and research to the topic in questions. This latter variant is perhaps especially relevant for the discipline of history, but it is by no means unique to it. Due to the near-omnipresent scepticism and the learned habit of taking a defensive stand at the sound of anything that can resemble anti-intellectual murmurings, we academics often tend to collect various responses, some more general and others more specific. The present blogpost is a general response about one of the needful things that the humanities teach us, namely our ability to know that we do in fact not know, and how we do not know it.   
           
Knowing that we do not know something might at first sound easy enough, as most of us will be forced to admit ignorance on a daily basis, even if that ignorance pertains to minute, ephemeral things such as the exact time of day or someone’s specific whereabouts. But not all forms of ignorance are as easily acknowledged or admitted, especially if we think that we do, indeed, know. To acknowledge certain forms of ignorance can be especially difficult in a society like that of the twenty-first century, where information surrounds us and overwhelms us at every minute, even in forms and ways we do not recognise because of how subtly we encounter it, or how inured we are to seeing it. But information is not the same as facts, truth or knowledge, especially because so much of the information we encounter is false – often deliberately so – or at best incomplete.    

Moreover, a lot of the information we encounter that is factual does not speak for itself, and does require types of literacy or methodological familiarity that most of us do not have – and I include myself in a number of such situations. One form of information that is particularly problematic in this regard is statistics, because even in the event that the statistical information can be said to be representative or accurate, it can only provide an incomplete picture.         

I was reminded of the need for statistical literacy earlier today thanks to a tweet by a friend and colleague, and it brought back a discussion I had had with another friend years and years ago. This discussion showcased very clearly and also quite hopelessly why it matters that we know that we do not know, and also that we know how we do not know.  

The argument itself is not relevant here. What is relevant is that my friend used a piece of statistical information to defend his position. The information he presented was not evidence in his favour, and neither could it be used in my favour, because the statistics dealt with an entirely different question than the one we were arguing about. In short, our argument was about a qualitative question, whereas the piece of statistical information was about a quantitative question. Very soon I became aware that my friend would not listen to my protests, and would not understand why my protests were relevant, not because he is stupid or stubborn, but because he did not have statistical literacy and did not know the methodological impossibility of using quantitative evidence to back up an entirely qualitative claim.       

What I remember best from that discussion, unimportant as the question itself was, is that strong feeling of forcelessness that enveloped me once I realised that there was no way to persuade my friend that his piece of evidence was irrelevant. He felt it strengthened his position so he stuck to it. And because he did not have the requisite methodological familiarity to understand why it was irrelevant, there was no way for me to convince him that it was irrelevant.      

One of the many things that are widely applicable beyond academia that we learn in the humanities is this: that when we are wrong, we not only recognise why we are wrong but how we are wrong; not only that we do not know but how we do not know something. And the ability to identify the missing information we need, or to see that what appears to be a piece of the puzzle is the piece of an entirely different puzzle, is not as intuitive as it might sound. An important issue here is that people are not stupid for lack of methodological familiarity or lack of literacy in a particular topic. There are many reasons why we do not know something, be it lack of the relevant education, or be it the sheer force of habitual thinking or tradition.            

This is not to say that a humanities education will fix the problem automatically. The quality of a humanities education depends in part on those who impart it, and also on the one who receives it, and not everyone is wired in such a way as to take on board certain forms of teaching. For myself, I am quite convinced that were I to embark on an education requiring comprehension of complex mathematics, I should no doubt fail to internalise the basic knowledge needed. But even though there are some who might receive an education in the humanities and come out the other end without having learned any of the basic tenets of critical thinking, there are countless others who will have done just that. And in a world where not everyone can know, learn, understand or make use of the exact same information, it is vital to our society that there are some of us who know that we do not know, and how we do not know it. And for such people to exist, we need the humanities.