Indeed:
"Reports that say there's -- that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."
—Donald Rumsfeld, then-United States Secretary of Defense
From wikepedia:
The
Plain English Campaign gave Rumsfeld its
Foot in Mouth Award.[SUP]
[/SUP]
However, linguist
Geoffrey Pullum disagreed, saying the quotation was "completely straightforward" and "impeccable, syntactically, semantically, logically, and rhetorically".[SUP]
[/SUP]
As for the substance of his statement, Rumsfeld's defenders have included
Canadian columnist
Mark Steyn, who called it "in fact a brilliant distillation of quite a complex matter", and Australian economist and
blogger John Quiggin, who wrote, "Although the language may be tortured, the basic point is both valid and important ... Having defended Rumsfeld, I'd point out that the considerations he refers to provide the case for being very cautious in going to war."[SUP]
[/SUP]Psychoanalytic philosopher
Slavoj Žižek extrapolates from these three categories a fourth,
the unknown known, that which we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know:* "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 know about, even though they form the background of our public values."
In his 2007 book
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells of a presentation on uncertainty he was requested to give to the
United States Department of Defense shortly before Rumsfeld's speech. The core message of
The Black Swan is that unknown unknowns are responsible for the greatest societal change.
Rumsfeld named his autobiography
Known and Unknown: A Memoir.
The event has been used in multiple books to discuss risk assessment
*
As in, "I cannot comment on a video that I have not seen or does not exist."