"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.”
This seems to be a skewed take on Confucius, as quoted in Thoreau's Walden: "To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."[1]
The statement won the 2003 Foot in Mouth award from the Plain English Campaign,[3] and is also hailed as an example of found poetry by the GOP Ministry of Official Poetry.
Psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zizek extrapolates from these three categories a fourth, the unknown known, that which we don't know or intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know:[7]
“ If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the "unknown unknowns," that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the "unknown knowns" - the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to known about, even though they form the background of our public values.
The term was in use within the United States military establishment long before Rumsfeld's quote to the press in 2002. An early use of the term comes from a paper entitled Clausewitz and Modern War Gaming: losing can be better than winning by Raymond B. Furlong
