The Dunno Effect: What "I Don't Know" Means

                      

             I don’t know, Marion says…and says…although it is clear to me that she knows what she is saying.  I interrupt at the next I dunno to say: “Yes, you do.”  Marion looks surprised and then smiles.  I’m right. This hiccupping of the phrase I dunno happens so frequently in classes, that I wonder at the causes and the effects of constantly repeating “I don’t know.”

            Just as with “I’m sorry,” there is a continuum of what “I don’t know” means and when it is appropriate and functional:

Hiccupping   I don’t matter    Don’t hurt me   I’m sorry to assert myself   I’m devoted to truth

            Let’s start at the right end of the spectrum.  You’re on a witness stand in a court of law.  The attorney asks, “Was this the woman you saw picking up the gun?”  You’re not sure.  So, you say “I don’t know.” Someone’s life is in the balance.  If you’re not sure. That is the responsible thing to say.

            Or you’re doing an experiment in a lab, and the supervisor asks for results: “Is the bacterium toxic?”  Your trials are uncertain, so you say “I don’t know.”

            Or a student in class asks me how Anne Hathaway felt about her husband, William Shakespeare.  I can theorize to cover my ignorance (if I’m playing at being the all-knowing professor), or I can be honest and say, “I don’t know. Here are some historical opinions that might be helpful to you.”

            Some things are unknowable. According to the dialog Plato wrote in Socrates’s voice on knowing, Theaetetus, knowledge is belief supported by evidence.  The philosophy and study of knowledge and the process of knowing is called “epistemology.”  And epistemic stance is a person’s point of view on what’s knowable.  To say “I don’t know” on the right end of the spectrum is to say “I don’t have enough experience or evidence to say.”

            My suspicion is that people develop the habit of saying “I don’t know” on the other side of spectrum, hiccupping, because they have too long been in an environment where others practice dominance over what is knowable and worth knowing.  Whether for virtuous reasons or because of ego insecurities, teachers too often take this position of omniscience—“I’m the one who knows.  You are to know what I know and how I know it.” They confuse what is knowable—did this beaker overflow, do 2 and 2 in the decimal system equal 10—and what is not knowable—what Shakespeare meant, who’s right, what will happen.  As the blog post on Purposes for Education explores, there are different epistemic modes that must be made explicit.

Exposed to teachers who assume an inaccurate epistemic stance as to what is knowable—day after day after week after month after year after decade—students may, in response, develop the habit of hiccupping “I don’t know”—so punctuating their discourse, that it’s a surprise if they ever come to develop appreciation for and confidence in their own individual epistemic stances—their own ways of knowing.  The I dunnos tend to be delivered in a whiny tone that also implies, Please don’t hurt me for my point of view. I don’t mean to be disrespectful to your all-knowingness. I don’t matter.  Please may I matter.

It’s no surprise that the sentence I don’t know is often accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders, as Harry does in the cover meme above.  That gesture is a defensive, protective one—as for an anticipated attack: shrinking the head into the body, retreating, covering the ears.  Retracting the head, like a turtle, into the protective shell of what one does know.

The other extreme from shoulder-shrugging defensiveness, is chest-puffing offense, as diagrammed in this continuum:

I know nothing                                        I know some things                                     I know it all

Perhaps I dunno hiccuppers have a sense of humility.  They don’t want to be like those know-it-alls who annoy us with their arrogance; who want to dominate by claiming that what they believe they know is knowable and therefore true.  But know-it-alls practice as much ignorance about their own epistemic integrity as hiccuppers.

What we say about ourselves become instructions to how our minds and bodies function. As always, education, as Socrates described in another Plato dialog, The Republic, is being brought out of the cave of ignorance into the light.  Listen for I dunnos—others’ and your own.  Listen for brave and honest I don’t knows. Eliminate the hiccup.  Embrace the search for truth that starts with I don’t know, for real.

Works Cited:

Cover Art: Harry Potter Shrugging

Texts:

Plato and Ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson. The Republic. Plato: Complete Works.

            Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

---. Theaetetus. Plato and Ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson. Plato: Complete Works.

            Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

Because I Can Teach:

Break the “I’m sorry” Habit: https://becauseicanteach.blogspot.com/2020/01/break-im-sorry-habit.html