Impossible Dictum

A dictum, or rule, that could not possibly be followed or considered because one does not even know that it should be considered in given circumstances, and usually, one does not know that one does not know of such dictum. Therefore, it is impossible to abide.


Keeley uses this term to describe a statement made by Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense:

“Now what is the message there? The message is that there are known ‘knowns.’ There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that’s basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns… There’s another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

The unknown unknowns are impossible dicta since we cannot know that which we do not know.
He uses this statement to defend agnosticism given that God is the ultimate conspirator and his Providence is the ultimate conspiracy.

Brian L. Keeley (2007). God as the Ultimate Conspiracy Theory. Episteme, 4, pp 135-149
doi:10.3366/epi.2007.4.2.135

_i
Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License