A wise saying attributed to the Greek philosopher Socrates is: “You don't know what you don't know.”

Aristotle's contribution was: "The more you know, the more you realize you don't know."

Today, we might ask: "How can we gain access to the areas that we don't know that we don't know?" If we knew the areas of our own ignorance such as how to make great pie pastry, we could/would simply ask, but there are those other regions that never occur to us because they occupy a realm we have never considered.

When I graduated from Teachers' College in 1962, the speaker at our commencement told us: "You will be teaching people who will get jobs that do not now exist requiring skills no one has done before." Believe it. Or sit down with a grandchild and ask them to tell you about the work they do. Even if they're baking pies, the oven they use probably has a control manual you couldn't decipher.

There are some clues that we may be missing something. Our fields of vision are often limited by what we expect to see. As Ashleigh Brilliant observed, "Seeing is believing. If I hadn't believed it, I wouldn't have seen it."

But even seeing is different than looking at. Artists are unique in this respect because they see what is actually there rather than what they think they should see, and it is a skill that some have taught themselves. I spoke with an African gentleman once who told me that while many people looked at a herd of cattle and saw a group of brown animals, the Maasai herdsman looked and saw some cows nursing, some pregnant, a few with some ailment, one with an injured hind hoof and so forth.

On the other side of this issue are those who are sure they see clearly even though what they describe is very different than what we observe. Adherents to a paricular system of belief will double down on certainty when confronted with contradictory evidence. We see this proclivity play out in politics especially, but it is no less evident in areas of health where some people are certain that vaccinations cause autism or even that "herd immunity" will protect a population if we just let a pandemic proceed although it may cost a few elder lives.

On a less-disputational front, there are the analogies we live by because they are "good enough" explanations for complex ideas. The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge and The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohleben & even the play As Above give a good layperson's description of a web of ecology in forest environments. Biologists I have been told (because I am not a biologist, nor even pretend to a scientific background) may find them oversimplifications of the processes involved in symbiosis & micronization, but if they encourage appreciation for and inspire protective action towards those forest areas, then they serve a purpose.

Chief Seattle may never have seen bison because he spent his life on the west coast, but if a script writer in Washington could inspire us to act responsibly towards an endangered prairie species by putting these words in that indigenous leader's mouth, then again, a larger purpose was served by reporting him as having said, "I have seen a thousand rotting buffalos on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and I do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive."

We do live in language - and you don't need a degree in philosophy or linguistics to see the truth of the real philosphers and mystics who said "Die Sprache ist das Haus des Sein" (Language is the house of being) from Martin Heidegger, or the much simpler "Nameless origin. Naming is the mother of things" from Lao Tzu in his ancient Chinese text, The Tao Te Ching.

And of course, beware of names bestowed/created by owners or their agencies to make a product seem benign. We have yet to really know how innocuous AI-powered products will be; however the nature imagery of "cloud" and other pretty memes does obscure the reality of huge impersonal computer banks storing and acting upon massive amounts of very personal data.

Or, perhaps and unfortunately closer to our own experience, we use terms such as "addiction" and "involuntary treatment" to imply some form of benevolent harm reduction in areas of substance "abuse" or "problematic use". I don't have easy solutions to the terrible problem of opioid-caused death on our streets, but I believe with Drs. Gabor Maté and Bruce Alexander that designating drug use as an "addiction" gives it medical status and implies medical domain treatment; but they say, "Treatment fails because drug addiction is not a disease but a way of adapting to desperately difficult situations. People cannot be 'cured' of adaptive strategies unless better alternatives are available to them … Addiction arises in fragmented societies because people use it as a way of adapting to extreme social dislocation. As a form of adaptation, addiction is neither a disease that can be cured nor a moral error that can be corrected by punishment and education." 

All of this consideration of scientific truth vs common beliefs gives me an ontological headache. Here's some simpler but much easier anecdotal evidence of our propensity to see what we want to see or be gently fooled by our friends. These are all from a collection I have called, Stories My Friends Told Me, and I have some very interesting friends. You're in good company.

Sitting around fires at night calls forth stories. It's something in the wood smoke that does it, and just as the smoke always knows where you're sitting no matter how many times you move, so the stories seldom change from one campfire to the next. They always know where to insert themselves. These things happened and even though everyone knew about them, they could always be repeated for good fireside entertainment.

Colin once brought the front half of a frozen salmon along as a meal contribution on one of our trout-fishing trips to an interior lake. After we had eaten it, he took the head down to the lakeshore and found a spot where other campers had launched their boats and cleaned their catches, and he heeled the fish head into the mud. The next morning as we ate breakfast we waited to hear what our camp mates might have to say. It wasn't long in coming. One early riser discovered the thing and roused his companions in heavily-accented English by exclaiming "Holy Jaysus, Lookit de size a dis ting. I dind know dere was fish dis big inda lake!" I don't think Colin ever enlightened them on the source of the skeleton. It probably made for good entertainment at their own future fireside storytelling times.

Killer whales, or orcas as we call them now, were frequent companions on our weekend salmon fishing outings in the waters off Victoria. Often at Race Rocks we would have schools pass through our fleet of weekend fishers. Although some people feared they would snag their trolled lines or drive off any salmon in the vicinity, we knew those were both myths used to explain why some people upped lines and headed for shore. In all the times we fished with orcas breaching and feeding around us, we never had one of them touch a line. Their ability to move among the fleet of boats with lines at different depths was amazing. And we figured, correctly as our catch demonstrated, that if the orcas were feeding in these waters, it must mean there were salmon here. Why would we leave?

On one trip we had an eastern relative of Colin's along and he had taken over the steering position while we reset the lines. As I pulled out line on my rod I saw in the distance a pod of orcas coming up on us and drew Colin's attention to it. He put finger to lips and took a seat beside our Ontario guest. As the pod closed in on our the stern, he casually asked, "Did you order up that pod of killer whales for this morning? It was your job to put in the call wasn't it?" I said that I had and they should be along pretty soon if the dispatcher did his job. And just as our guest was scoffing that he wasn't buying that kind of story, a big orca breached right beside us. Very impressive. I'm pretty sure that it made for a good fireside tale in both Ontario and BC.

Teachers tell stories as blithely as any fisher and most of them are about students. You can catch your fill of these anecdotes at any staff room coffee time and most of them aren't stretched too far from the truth.  One colleague came in shaking his head about his lesson on poetic forms in which he swore a kid - one of the back-row crowd - had volunteered that he knew what the really long poetic line was called. "It's an iambic kilometre, isn't it." Well, some of us had heard it before, but it was still plausible knowing the kid he referenced, and it didn't spill much coffee.

I had a few contributions to the classroom chronicles myself, but I'll only give you one. Joy is sometimes lurking in here among these blog postings and she has her own store of pithy Peach pits she could tell on me. Actually she might have been the one this centres on. Anyway, it was a writing lesson. The theme was set, the free writing had been done, the composition process was under way. As an aid to that process, I did what I often did (and also to make my marking job easier) by standing at the chalkboard and writing out any word any student wanted spelled. A female voice asked, "Commitment, Sir; how d'ja spell 'commitment?'"

I turned to the board, chalk in hand and began speaking in a stutter.

"k … un k, k k,k,k

I can't do it. I'm a guy."

I think she threw something at me.

And while we're on school stories, this one from the Land Down-Under was culturally illuminating as well as entertaining. I was on a teacher exchange in Renmark, South Australia, and at a school dance I had commented on the easy affection shown by students to their moms who had come as chaperones. Boys would dance with mothers and even sit beside them, things which no male student past grade five in a Canadiian context would ever do in public. A teacher offered me this story to explain (he said) the relationship of the entire Australian male population to their moms (and later to their wives). He said 

"We were at a camp-out and I was making myself a coffee beside the campfire one evening and I asked one of the lads if he wanted one too. He said,'Yes, thank you Sir' and so I asked him what he wanted in it. He replied - absolutely straight out - 'I dunno, Sir. Me mom always fixes it for me.'"

Tell me it's true, David.

Canadian citizenship is a valuable credential, even in these days of the psychotic babbles from the administration of our southern neighbour. A former school chum told me of his citizenship acquisition. Iain's family had arrived from Scotland and found a congenial, prosperous life in Canada. In adulthood, Iain's mom berated her son for not having taken out citizenship and he finally acquiesed "just to keep her happy" as he said. But he was going on a canoe trip on the Athabaska River and so the ceremony would have to wait. Once completed, however, the final part of the process was an interview with a magistrate in chambers, and Iain faced an elderly jurist who had some final test questions for this applicant. "Do you know who this is?" the magistrate asked, pointing to a framed portrait of Queen Elizabeth on the wall behind his desk. Iain studied the print for a moment and then replied, Well, it looks a lot like Dolly Parton on a bad hair day."

"Very good" replied the judge. "Now tell me about this canoe trip you've just done."

And finally a family story, probably misquoted after much retelling, as a rebuttal by a Saskatchewan farm wife to the criticism by a young woman from Ontario suggesting that she was like a slave to be getting up at ungodly hours to put meals on the table for husband and hired hands and then spend her day baking and tending garden and doing all sorts of other chores just for the benefit of those menfolk. Her reply was "I'm more than an unpaid helper on this farm. It's actually mine. Just as you put gasoline in a tractor so it'll work, I just put food in the men so they can go ride horses, get in the crops, fix the fences and yell at the cows."

So, even if you're not certain that you know how to know what you don't know, relax. You're in good company. Just check up on the "facts" that politicians are going to fill the news stories with in the coming months.