Four square epistemology

Those who follow my life closely might know that I’m going back to school this fall. Previously I spoke about the frustrations of applying for universities; that didn’t stop me from applying nor from getting in, though not to the program I was frustrated by in that post. I’m going into a graduate certificate at the University of Illinois in “Computing Fundamentals” this fall; it’s a one year program aimed particularly at people who don’t have any formal education in computing but who want to enter “the field” (their term).

I’m nervous: my entire computing practice has been alone, on my own terms, at my own pace. I have freedom, by myself, to pursue what I want to. But after a year of practice—in fact, after a small lifetime of messing around with computers in one way or another—I’m still an ignoramus. I’ve been reading Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics the last couple days, and I feel like a drooling infant. Weiner, of course, was a child prodigy: he finished his PhD. at 18 years old and only got smarter from there. I don’t know, frankly, that I’ll ever understand what the sam hell Norbert’s talking about. Well, I understand the prose perfectly clearly, and I have an intuitive sense of what he’s going for. But pages and pages of equations that don’t mean anything to me but which follow “clearly” from one another begin to get me down. I’m worried that it’ll be more of the same this fall at Illinois.

I don’t know: maybe I’m just hyping myself up. It’s a classic case of imposter syndrome: everyone feels that they’re an imposter in their field, but even the experts don’t know everything: Doug McIlroy “skim[med] the dull parts” (Donald Knuth, Literate Programming page 170), and TeX had errors and mistakes. Now, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t coming for you; on the other hand, even if your jealousy is well-founded doesn’t mean it’s not pathological (Lacan, citation to be found). What if I really am an imposter? We all are.

I had a professor (Mario Aguilar) who said, “the scholar is the one who knows”, which I am certain he got from Lacan too. But are they the one who knows? If they know, what are they researching? Maybe what he meant was that the scholar holds knowledge on behalf of the community: they are the one who knows more than the average bear (Yogi Bear). I have this experience with computing: I certainly know a little more than many of the people I meet; concretely, I understand more than I used to. I remember, in high school, arguing about what the internet was and how it worked; of course, being in high school, I didn’t go home and look it up: I just wanted to argue. Now I’m aware of how much I don’t know about computers, and I know where to go to learn more.

It’s time for my favorite, Zizeko-Rumsfeldian, diagram of epistemology:

Known Knowns	Known Unknowns
Unknown Knowns	Unknown Unknowns

This is the square of knowledge. The original context (Donald Rumsfeld, citation forthcoming) was military: we know that we know the geography of the country we are invading; we know that we don’t know how well equipped the enemy fighters are; we don’t know that we don’t know how many soldiers lie waiting in ambush for us over the next hill. Zizek’s elaboration is the final quadrant: we don’t know that we know our own ideology; it is here that the unconscious ideological fantasy directs our actions: we act according to some knowledge that we don’t know we have but which nevertheless impacts the way we know the world. Or something like that: Zizek’s work is about as impenetrable as Weiner’s—equations, graphs, and all (Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology).

With computers, most of our knowledge is unknown unknowns: we don’t know what we don’t know about how it all works, so we don’t know how ignorant we are. We think that what we know is a large proportion of what there is to know, and the technology firm doesn’t do much to disabuse us of this notion. On the other hand, as we move our few known unknowns into the realm of known knowns, we discover that the vacuum is filled by a larger number of new known unknowns surging up out of unknown unknownitude. For everything we come to know, we discover a far greater quantity that we now know we don’t know; the trickle of information from the top-right to the top-left produces a flood from the bottom-right to the top-right. All the time, the bottom-left is silently laughing at us, since it holds the keys to the gate between the right-side quadrants.

All I’ve learned, in short, is how ignorant I really am. Was it Ellen Ullman who talked about “islands of knowledge seperated by seas of ignorance”? When you’re on an island, you don’t necessarily know how large the sea around you is. It’s only when you set out in a little boat that you come to understand the vastness of the ocean. Hence my apprehension about the graduate program this fall: I’d like to be on a comfortable island whose nooks and crannies I (know that I) know, but I must set out into the vast (unknown) unknown, whose vastness I am only coming to know. How else will I ever learn anything?