There is a difference between the things we know we do not know, and the things it would never occur to us to wonder about. And almost all our lives, we notice only the first kind.
You know you cannot read a balance sheet. You know you cannot say what is actually wrong with your car, or the name of the man three desks away. Those gaps have a definite shape. You know where they are; and because you know where they are, you could, if you wanted, close them — take the course, ask the mechanic, learn the name. That kind of not-knowing announces itself, and it tells you how to end it.
Tonight I want to begin with the other kind. And I will begin where the whole series began — with the woman behind the wall.
You remember her. For two years she said the building was making her ill, and for two years I treated her as the anxious one, and trusted the email that said the air had been tested and was fine. And then they found the mould, behind her wall. Afterwards I made myself a quiet promise: listen better; the next time someone says something is wrong, do not dismiss them. It is a good promise. It would have caught her.
But here is what I have been turning over since, and it is worse than the thing the promise repairs. The promise only does anything if someone complains. The whole process — the email, the test, the search behind the wall — began only because people on that floor were getting headaches: people whose word, once I was paying attention, counted. Now suppose the fault in that building had only ever harmed someone who was never on that floor. The night cleaners. A contractor down in the basement for a week. Someone the building had no category for at all. Then there are no headaches. There is no woman pointing at a wall. No complaint is filed wrongly, because no complaint is filed at all. And no mould is ever found — not because it is not there, but because the question "is this harming anyone?" was only ever asked about the people who counted, and only ever answered yes when one of them happened to feel it.
There is no one to be proved right, later. That is the part that stops me. When I disbelieved her, I was wrong — but the wrong could be found. It was behind the wall the whole time, waiting. The harm that no one on the floor can feel leaves no mould. It leaves nothing at all. It leaves a building that, by every standard it knows how to apply, has no problem whatever.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the eighth episode of nine. Last week we set out the three ways power can place a belief in your mind while the whole process feels like nothing more than your own reasoning. It borrows your ideals. It arranges whom you trust. It shapes the evidence that reaches you. Three mechanisms, and each of them puts something into your picture of the world.
Tonight is the other half, and I think it is the worse half. Not the beliefs that are placed in you, but the questions you are kept from ever asking — the not-knowing that is not a gap you could go and fill, because it never shows up as missing at all. The kind where the very thing that would tell you something is absent is itself the thing that is gone.
At the centre of tonight there is a hard claim, made by a serious philosopher: that some of this not-knowing is not an accident, that it is produced and maintained. And there is an equally serious objection to it: that "produced and maintained" is exactly the sort of thing one can say about an absence and never be made to take back. Both will still be standing at the end of the hour. I cannot knock either one down. And by the end, I think you will see why I cannot — and why you cannot either.
Let me make that difference exact, because the whole hour rests on it.
Take the first kind of not-knowing, the labelled gap. The reason you can deal with it is that you can state it. "I do not know how mortgages work" is itself a piece of knowledge; it has a name and a location, and you know where to look. And because you can identify it, you can act on it — ask, read, hire the person who does know. The gap arrives with the instructions for closing it.
Now the second kind: a question you have never once formed. Not a question you have been avoiding — avoiding is a way of having, since you must know a thing is there in order to keep your eyes off it. I mean a question that has simply never occurred to you, about something you would have said you understood completely. The difficulty with that kind is precise, and it is total. You cannot go and fill it in, because filling in a gap means knowing the gap is there, and the whole character of this one is that, to the person who has it, it is not there. It does not register as missing. It feels instead like the boundary of what there is to know — the point where your understanding stops, and you assume it stops there because the world itself stops there too.
You cannot audit it. And I want to be careful with that word, because this whole series has been about auditing — about whether you can check your own sense of who is credible from the inside. We found, in the fifth week, that you cannot tell from within whether a moment of discounting tracked how reliable a speaker actually was, or only tracked where they stood in relation to you; the two feel identical. This is that same problem, one level deeper, and worse. There, at least, the discounting was in front of you: you had done it, and could hold it up, even if you could not grade it. Here there is nothing in front of you at all. An audit needs an item to examine, and the item is exactly what is missing.
And before we reach for the obvious way out — I cannot see my own blanks, so I will ask someone else, I will go and find out — recall what we settled in the trust series, and again at the start of this one. No one has ever been the sole checker of anything. Almost everything you know, you hold on someone else's word: the textbook, the teacher, the person who taught the teacher. That is not a scandal; it is simply the human condition. But it means the way out does not work as you would hope. The people you would ask are, for the most part, the people your existing sense already counts as worth asking. The sources you would turn to are the ones it already counts as sources. So in setting out to find what you are missing, you set out with the very instrument that did the missing. You investigate your own omissions using the framework that produced them, and it reports back, in good faith, that everything has been accounted for.
So that is the ground tonight. Not the things we know we do not know, but the things your sense of the world has quietly ruled out as not even being questions — and the unsettling possibility that those exclusions were not random. That some of those apparent boundaries were placed there, by something, for a reason. That is the claim I want to build now, and build as strongly as I can, because it deserves its strongest form before I turn and test it.
The philosopher is Charles Mills, and the essay is called "White Ignorance." The first thing to grasp is how strong his claim is, because there is a weak version that is easy and harmless and not what he means.
The weak version runs: people have gaps in what they know, and powerful people have convenient ones. Everyone will grant that. Mills means something with far more force in it. He means that some not-knowing is not a gap or a shortfall at all, but an achievement — something produced, and then actively maintained, because it does work: it is useful, it holds something in place. And, the part that belongs to this series in particular, it is held in place by the very two things we have spent eight weeks on: the rules for what counts as evidence, and the rules for whose testimony is heard. The same social machinery that distributes credibility also distributes ignorance. It is one mechanism, working in two directions at once.
Here is how that works on his account, and I will use the case he builds it on, because that is where the idea lives; in the abstract it loses its force. Consider how a whole society comes to know its own history. It knows it through records — documents, testimony, the things written down and kept and treated as serious. Now suppose the rules for what counts as a serious record, a credible witness, a genuine document, were arranged, over a very long time, so that a whole category of people's accounts of what was being done to them never qualified. Not weighed and rejected — never admitted. Their testimony was not found wanting; it was never the kind of thing that counted as testimony in the first place.
What you are left with, generations later, is an archive with holes in it that do not look like holes. They look like the absence of evidence. Someone consults the record, in perfectly good faith, and says: there is no evidence that such a thing happened. And they are right about the record. But on Mills' account the absence in that record was not a discovery; it was an outcome, produced earlier by the rules about whose word was ever written down. Everyone who consults the record later inherits the gap and reads it as a fact about the world, when it was a fact about the filing.
That is the case Mills draws the idea from, and he draws it out of a larger argument of his: that one can read an entire social order as a kind of contract to which some people are parties and others are merely subject. I am going to set that larger argument aside for another night, deliberately, because it is a claim about politics and power and how societies are actually built, and it deserves its own hearing rather than a paragraph from me. Tonight I want only the epistemology — the part about knowing and not-knowing — because that is our subject and it stands on its own: that a society's rules about whose testimony counts can produce, and then protect, a very specific not-knowing.
Now set Mills' central point against everything we have done so far. For eight weeks the failure we have worried about is the discounted witness — the person whose word you wrongly wave away. The woman behind the wall. That failure is bad. But Mills wants us to see that it is not the worst one, and his reason is this: it can be found. The mould was there. She was there. The wrong was in a definite place, and one day a person can go to that place and say, I was wrong, here it is. The discounted witness can, in principle, be proved right.
The unasked question cannot. When the rules of evidence keep something from ever becoming a question, there is no witness left to be vindicated later, because the matter never went far enough to leave anything behind. There is no mould. There is no trace, and a society that, by every standard it knows how to apply, has no problem, no gap, and nothing to answer for. That, Mills says, is the worst thing a system of credibility does — not the people it wrongly doubts, but the questions it makes unaskable, and then, by making them unaskable, makes invisible, so that the record looks most complete exactly where it has done the most damage.
That is the claim at full strength: a not-knowing that is made, maintained, useful, and self-concealing. Take it seriously, and take it all the way, because in a moment I am going to give the other side its full strength too, and I do not want the first one let off lightly.
Let me connect this to what we have been doing all along, because it is the same undertaking, carried to the point where it is hardest to follow.
This whole series has been about catching the sense of who is credible that you did not consciously form — the inherited judgement you bring to people rather than read off them. In the fifth week we turned it on a judgement you had actually made, and found it could not be graded from inside. In the sixth week we reached for an outside standard to grade it against, and found there was none. Tonight we turn that same attention on the blank spots, and here is why it is the hardest step we have taken. Everywhere else there was at least something to examine — a judgement you had made, a source, a chain you could trace until it disappeared. The blank offers nothing to examine. You are being asked to attend to an absence that, by its very nature, does not present itself.
And it is worse still, because the absence protects itself. Consider what you would need to detect a produced blank. You would need a reliable sense of what counts as a real question, a real source, a credible witness, so as to notice when one had gone missing. But those are precisely the things the blank was produced by. The rules that settled whose testimony counts are the very rules you would have to use to notice whose testimony is absent. So the instrument you would reach for to find the hole is the instrument that made it. A produced ignorance does not only hide a fact; it hides the fact that it is hiding anything. It conceals its own concealment, and the form that concealment takes is the most reassuring sentence there is: there is nothing here to see; the picture is complete.
Which raises a fair question. If it is hidden that well, how does anyone ever see it? The honest answer, and it has been implicit in this series since the fourth week, is that usually the people on the far side of the blank can see it perfectly well.
We met that idea earlier, through Du Bois, in what he called second-sight. The person a society shuts out is forced to learn two things at once: their own life, and the world of the people at the centre, because they have to move through that world to survive it. They become, of necessity, double. They know the official picture, and they know what the official picture leaves out — because they are what it leaves out. And the other side of this, the side that matters tonight, is that what one person is forced to know, another is permitted not to know. The blank in your sense of the world is not blank for everyone; it is blank for those at the centre. And it stays blank for them because the people for whom it is not blank cannot get their testimony to count — which is the very same exclusion that opened the blank in the first place. The not-knowing and the not-being-heard turn out to be one thing seen from two ends.
So this is not a story about some people being stupid and others clever. The careful, honest, intelligent person at the centre can have the blank in perfect working order — precisely because they are at the centre. Being well placed is what produces the blind spot. Comfort is not a sign that one is safe from it; comfort is its cause. And that is the deepest form of the thing this whole series has kept returning to: your sense of the world can feel most complete exactly where you should trust it least, because the place it has done its quietest work is the place it has also hidden that any work was done.
Now, if I stopped here, you would leave tonight persuaded of one side only. You would leave certain that credibility is simply power, that every blank is a crime, and that the careful doubter from the second week — the one who says, follow the evidence and nothing else — has finally been defeated. So I am not going to stop here. There is a serious objection I have not yet raised, one that has been waiting the whole hour, and it is one I cannot answer.
Here is the objection, and I am going to put it as well as I put the other one, because it is every bit as good.
Ignorance, the objector says, is simply the absence of true belief. That is all it is. One fails to believe some true thing; there is a blank where the belief would sit. And blanks are the most ordinary thing in the world. No one knows everything; no one comes close. Every finite creature that has ever lived is ignorant of an enormous number of things, most of which they will never even learn exist. That is not a conspiracy. That is simply what it is to be a limited mind in a world larger than oneself. So to take an ordinary blank — the kind everyone has, the kind that comes free with being finite — and call it an achievement, something made and maintained and doing useful work, is to smuggle in a whole story about intention and design that you have not established. You have taken a fact about limits and dressed it up as a fact about power.
And then the objector raises the point I genuinely cannot get past, the one with the most force in exactly this place. Suppose you say: no, this blank is different, this one was produced. The objector asks a fair question in return. How would you ever be shown wrong? What would it even look like for the claim of produced ignorance to fail a test? And you open your mouth to answer and find you cannot, because the whole claim rests on what you cannot see. The evidence that the blank was manufactured is, by your own account, missing — that is what makes it a blank. So any absence at all can be redescribed as produced. Point to any gap you like, and I can say: ah, but that one was made, that one is maintained, that one is doing work — and you can never once show me to be wrong, because the thing that would show me wrong is the thing we have already agreed is not there. A claim that nothing could ever count against is not a strong claim. It is a claim that has quietly stopped being about the world. It does rhetorical work — it makes a powerful accusation — but it does not do the work a piece of knowledge does, which is to stand exposed and risk being false.
That is a real objection, and I want to say so as plainly as I can, because everything in me while I was building the previous segment wanted you to walk straight past it. Do not. It is not refuted tonight. The careful person who says — I will believe what is well evidenced, and I will stay honest about how much I must be missing, but I will not call every hole a crime, because I cannot tell the crimes from the ordinary holes — that person has not been defeated. They have been made more uncomfortable, which is not the same thing, and I will not pretend it is.
And now the strangest part, the part that has been the shape of this whole series and appears here in its clearest form. Look at what the two of them are actually standing on. Mills says: there is a blank in your sense of the world that you cannot see, and it was made. The doubter says: you cannot show me it was made rather than merely absent. And the reason the doubter is right that you cannot show it — that you cannot see the blank, cannot audit it, cannot hold it up to the light — is the very same reason Mills is right that it is dangerous. The invisibility that makes Mills' point land is the invisibility that makes the doubter's objection unanswerable. They are not disagreeing about some fact set out in front of them. They are both standing before the same absence, and one of them says something was taken from here, and the other says you cannot prove anything was ever here at all — and from where you stand, in front of that absence, with the instruments you actually have, you cannot tell which of them is right.
And this is not a deadlock I am handing you from the outside, like a referee with a clear view. It is the place the series has been leading since the first night. Power and accuracy can look identical from the inside — that was the sixth week. Tonight we learn that produced ignorance and plain human finitude can look identical too. The same absence, indistinguishable from the outside. And you are not standing above it, looking down, sorting the one from the other; you are standing in front of it, with no means of telling the difference.
Let me set down plainly what you have at the end of tonight, because it is less than a verdict, and that is deliberate.
Here is the small thing both of them agree on, stripped of either one's vocabulary. Your sense of the world leaves things out. And you cannot draw up a list of what it leaves out from inside it, because the list would have to be made with the same instrument. That much is simply true, and neither the philosopher nor the doubter denies it. What they disagree about — and what I am not going to settle, because I do not think it can be settled from where any of us stands — is what that leaving-out is. Whether some of those absences are made and maintained and doing work, as Mills says, or whether they are only the ordinary not-knowing that every finite mind lives inside, as the doubter says, so that to call them anything grander is a story we tell ourselves because the accusation is satisfying to make. Both of those still stand. I have taken neither one down. All I have shown is that you cannot see well enough to choose between them — and that the not-seeing is itself the very thing they are fighting about.
So I am not going to hand you your blind spot. And I want to be clear that this is not me holding back a revelation for effect. It is the opposite. The honest thing tonight is that I cannot give you your blank, and the reason I cannot is the entire point. If I could name it for you, it would not be the kind of thing we have been discussing: the moment it can be named, it becomes the first kind of not-knowing, the labelled gap, and you can go and fill it in. The kind that matters is the kind neither of us can name.
But I can give you the shape of the search, and then leave you standing in it, which is the only honest place to leave you. So do this. Take something you would say you genuinely understand — your own field, your own town, your own family, the thing a stranger would trust you to explain. And go looking for its unasked question. Not something you know you do not know; that is the easy kind, and it will not be the one. The thing it has never once occurred to you to wonder. Work within the area you are competent in, and try to notice where that competence ends, and notice what happens: you can produce, all day, the things you know you are missing, and you cannot produce a single one of the things you do not know you are missing — because the instant you could, it would stop being one.
If you want one foothold, one piece of evidence that this is not merely a play on words, try this. Think of a question you can ask now that you genuinely could not have formed ten years ago, or twenty. Not a fact you have since learned — a question, a whole way of asking about something, that was simply not available to you, that you would have met with a blank stare had someone put it to you then, and that now seems so plainly worth asking you can hardly believe you once lived without it. You have one; most people do. And that question proves two things at once: that this category is real — you have lived on the near side of such a blank and then crossed to the far side of it — and that there is, right now, tonight, another one just like it in your sense of the world. A question you cannot form, that someone ten years from now, or someone standing somewhere you have never stood, would find obvious. You can be certain it is there. You cannot point to it. Hold those two facts together and let go of neither: it is there, and you cannot see it. That is where this series has been taking you. It is a less comfortable place than the one you came in from, and I am not going to soften it.
That is the eighth episode, of nine. Next week is the last, and it does the one thing left to do. It brings all of them into the same room at once — every rival we have raised one at a time, the careful one, the sceptic, and all those in between — and instead of announcing who won, it hands you back the question you walked in with on the very first night, the one about the woman and the email, sharper than you left it. That is next week. I am not going to reach for it tonight, because tonight has its own work and you are not finished with it.
So here is what to take out the door. Go to the thing you trust your own understanding of most, the one place you would never think to doubt, and go looking for the question it is keeping you from asking. You will not find it. That is not the exercise failing; that is the exercise. Notice how complete your understanding feels exactly where you should trust it least. And carry that — not the comfort of thinking you have spotted your blind spot, which would only mean you had mistaken it for the easy kind. Carry the one you cannot see.
Thanks for listening. I will see you next time.