Actually, Dick Cheney all those white dudes look alike Rumsfeld put his unknown unknowns in with my known unknowns…
I was at the airport, checking in at the gate when an airport employee asked, ‘Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?’ To which I replied, ‘If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?’ He smiled knowingly and nodded,
‘That’s why we ask.’
via. (Probably one of those ‘what I should have said was….’ rather than reality. But good!)
(More philosophy blogging as soon as I get an idea, kids.)
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14 comments
January 2, 2009 at 8:55 pm
jacob
Reminds me of an acknowledgments once mentioned (I think) on Crooked Timber. The author thanks several people and then says something like “It is traditional to say that any errors in the text are my fault and not theirs. But if I knew they were there, I wouldn’t have let them go through, and if I don’t know they’re there, I can’t say whose fault they are.” (PS. anyone know what I’m referring to? I’d love to have the real citation.)
January 3, 2009 at 12:19 am
ian in hamburg
Good thing you weren’t a Muslim family with little kids. They’d have blocked access to your flight, treated you like criminals…
January 3, 2009 at 5:40 am
kid bitzer
with a healthy, or perhaps unhealthy, dollop of mother-theresa level charity, one can almost make the screener mean something coherent.
the idea would be that you had in fact seen something, or been aware of some episode, which at the time you had not registered as a case of someone putting something in your luggage. but in light of the screener’s question, you would be reminded of this episode and have it put into a new light, such that you would now realize that it did constitute a case of someone putting something in your luggage.
i’m leaning heavily on “that’s why we ask”, i.e. the very act of our asking may put you in a new cognitive state, because our question will serve to remind you or recontextualize some previous experience.
so, someone put something into your luggage without your knowing, at the time, that it was an act of that sort. so you didn’t know that they put something into your luggage. but you did know, e.g., that the suspicious-looking cabby took your luggage out of his trunk, brought it into a shed, closed the door, and came out two minutes later carrying your luggage again.
“have you seen any superheroes without your knowledge?”
“if it was without my knowledge, how would i know?”
“well, you might not have known then, but here’s a question: did you see clark kent?”
“yes”
“then, without your knowledge, you saw a superhero. and this present exchange puts you in a position to know now what you did not know then.”
eh, the game is probably not worth the candelas.
by the way, i think you’re thinking of rummy, not darth cheney.
January 3, 2009 at 7:03 am
jazzbumpa
Yes, context is the key. Still, by their idiocy shell ye know them. And I think Kid is right, I associate “not knowing what I don’t know” with the Rumster.
January 3, 2009 at 7:17 am
dana
Oh, you are right.
kid, that’s extraordinarily charitable, but I will buy and eat a hat if there was really a Lois Lane-knows-Superman-can-fly-but-doesn’t-know-&c example going on here.
January 3, 2009 at 7:34 am
jhm
My attempt to make the question sensible was to assume that it was asked whilst you both were examining the contents of your luggage (i.e., “is there anything here that you did not put there (here?)?”
Failing that, the question might have been a poorly phased query as to whether someone included something in the luggage, but you do not know what that is (which I find only very slightly less idiotic even if we assume that what was meant).
January 3, 2009 at 7:53 am
drip
Not knowing what you don’t know is called “double dumb” in many places. Knowing what you don’t know, is better, knowing that you don’t know may be best of all.
January 3, 2009 at 8:07 am
aep
I see here that philosophers (or would-bes) provide a valuable service to the people in their neighborhood (even though it feels like a hat trick): they can elevate the absurd until it becomes the deepest thought in the room and the naysayers are but skimming the surface. It’s very democratic. Behold the genius:
A Confession, by Donald Rumsfeld
Once in a while,
I’m standing here, doing something.
And I think,
“What in the world am I doing here?”
It’s a big surprise.
—May 16, 2001
January 3, 2009 at 8:09 am
dana
jhm, my sense is that there are two things that could be going on. The first is that it’s a badly worded attempt to ask whether one knows what is in one’s bag without implying culpability or complicity (a la Fight Club “a”, not “your” dildo. Never say the dildo turned itself on.)
Or it’s a way to establish culpability. “X said everything in his luggage was there with his knowledge, which includes these DRUGS of DOOM.”
January 3, 2009 at 9:36 am
grackle
I think kid bitzer is actually channeling Rummy.
January 3, 2009 at 9:40 am
Dean
The thing is, most terrorists and drug “mules” aren’t good liars. If you ask them if they have contraband, they might actually say “yes”. Or on a more Freudian level, if you ask them a brain-teaser of a question like this, they’ll respond as if they were asked “is there anything in your baggage that I shouldn’t know about?” because they’re so preoccupied with not talking about it. Followed by the TSA agent saying “Gotcha!”. It’s related to the “don’t think about an elephant” paradox.
January 3, 2009 at 10:11 am
drip
I don’t know what airports Dean flies through, but the people looking in my luggage and asking me questions close my suitcase no matter how I answer any question. It’s related to the “for $8.00 an hour, I am not touching anything icky” rule. Of course it helps to be a middle aged white guy in a suit.
January 4, 2009 at 8:08 pm
raybro
Who checks in at the gate?
January 6, 2009 at 4:24 am
ajay
It makes sense for this reason:
It’s impossible to answer yes to the question, but it’s possible to answer no. You could answer no by reasoning like this: “I packed my bag myself, and it was empty when I started, and it’s been in my sight ever since. So if anyone else had put anything in it, I would know. Therefore it is impossible for anyone to have put anything in it without my knowledge. Therefore: no.”
The other acceptable answer is: I don’t know.
Or, if someone else gave you a package to carry, then the contents of the package are in the case without your knowledge, because you don’t know specifically what they are.