Re: rumsfeld wins award

In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Morton Davis wrote:
> 
> "LIBassbug" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
>>
>> nick wrote:
>>
>> > US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has won a "Foot in Mouth" award for
> one
>> > of his now legendary bizarre remarks.
>> > Mr Rumsfeld won the prize for comments made at a news conference in
> February
>> > last year which left observers baffled.
>> >
>> > "There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know
>> > there are known unknowns," he said.
>> >
>> > Runner up:
>> >
>> > Mr Schwarzenegger weighed in on the gay marriage debate with the comment
> "I
>> > think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a
>> > woman"
>> >
>> > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3254852.stm
>> >
>> > Good to know that the man in charge of all those nukes can't form a
>> > sentence.
>>
>> It's daja vou all over again.
>>
> Donald Rumsfeld isn't in charge of the nukes. Bush is. Howeve, Donald
> Rumsfeld's sentence makes perfect sense.

I agree with that.  He's dividing up knowledge into three categories:

   What you know that you know:  the known known.
   What you know that you don't know:  the known unknown.
   What you don't know that you don't know:  the unknown unknown.

There could also be a fourth category of unknown known--things that you don't
know that you know.  That category figures prominently in the dialogues of
Plato, for example in the Meno, where Socrates shows that an uneducated slave
intuitively knows some aspects of geometry without having been taught.

Rumsfeld uses this categorization as part of a bad argument to defend
the Bush administration's failure to find evidence of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, but he was given the award for generating
gobbledygook, not for giving a bad argument.

-- 
Jim Lippard   [EMAIL PROTECTED]    http://www.discord.org/
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