Potential knowns

The JC’S favourite Big Ideas™ →Go uptown There are six types of known. The Rumsfeld three: Known knowns: Things you do know you know; Known unknowns: Things you do know you don’t know; Unknown unknowns: Things you don’t know you don’t know; And the Jolly Contrarian three: Unknown knowns: Things you don’t know you do know. Not officially known: Things you know but the general public can’t prove. Knowable unknowns: Things you don’t know, but think you do know, for the time being, because computers. Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Big ideas The Devil’s Advocate Philosophy Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Potential knowns
/pə(ʊ)ˈtɛnʃ(ə)l nəʊnz/ (n.)
(Reductionist baloney)

The complete set of all knowns, be they known, unknown or constructive, comprising the total intellectual energy of the semantic universe. According to reductionist thinking, the sum total value of all knowns is 1.

This led some to career off down a logical oubliette in the quest to formulate axiomatic algebraic expressions of the relationship between all potential knowns, such as:

A = (K-C) - (U+C')
Where:
A = All Potential Knowns
K = Actual Knowns
C = Actually unknown Constructive Knowns
C' = Actually known Constructive Unknowns

This was all well and good, kept lots of legal technologists and thought leaders busy propagating wise hot takes on Twitter until it occurred that the truth value of the very proposition “there is a finite number of knowns in the universe” is, itself, unprovable and therefore unknowable — meaning it is therefore not a potential known, and since (on a reductionist theory) the proposition does have a truth value (in that it must do: it is either true or false; it is just that no-one knows which), then the complete set of truths in the universe cannot be encapsulated within the potential knowns after all, and reductionism fails.

O tempora. O paradox.

See also

• Forensic epistemology