Can We Know What We Do Not Know?

Recently I watched a video in which the renowned conductor Zheng Xiaoying spoke about music education in China. She said that progress in music education for the general public had been slow. Many people could not read staff notation and lacked a basic understanding of music with multiple independent parts, making it difficult for them to pursue further study or take part in more complex musical activities. She spoke with urgency, but what I heard was less a complaint than the anxiety and concern of a musician who had spent many years teaching music and bringing it to a wider public.

Her concern has a basis. Zheng has devoted decades to making opera and symphonic music more accessible. As early as the late 1970s, she began explaining the music to audiences before opera performances, hoping to help ordinary people understand the works. Zhou Haihong, a professor at the Central Conservatory of Music, has also written about a recurring problem in some Chinese schools: basic music knowledge is taught from scratch again and again, leaving students unable to build on what they have learnt even as they move into higher year levels.

Of course, an inability to read staff notation does not necessarily mean a lack of musical literacy. Musical literacy also involves listening skills, a sense of rhythm, expressive ability and an understanding of different musical traditions. Traditional Chinese music has its own practices of multipart singing, such as the grand song of the Dong people. Zheng was identifying specific and important shortcomings in modern music education. These observations alone cannot justify a judgement that musical ability is generally poor throughout Chinese society. Yet these qualifications are no reason to avoid the problems she raised.

What also struck me were the comments beneath the video. I saw many people picking at her wording and looking for points to refute. Reading them brought to mind two everyday Chinese expressions: taigang, arguing for the sake of arguing, and jiaozhen, insisting on getting things right. Different people may use these expressions differently, but the labels are not what matters. I want to distinguish two ways of engaging in a discussion that we do encounter.

For the moment, I will call a discussion aimed at refuting the other person taigang. Someone first takes up a position of opposition, then looks for weaknesses in what the other person has said. They may even deliberately push a statement to an extreme to show that it cannot hold. By the end, they may have won a few verbal exchanges without making the matter itself any clearer.

Jiaozhen has a different aim: to understand the issue clearly and accurately. It may lead to agreement with the other person, or it may reveal a real error. When necessary, someone pursuing accuracy should also be willing to revise their own judgement. The distinction is not whether someone raises objections, but whether refutation is the goal and whether facts and reasoning can change their original understanding.

For example, the observation that an ability to read music does not encompass all musical literacy deserves serious consideration. I made that distinction earlier myself. But if someone treats it as a reason to dismiss Zheng’s concern about music education altogether, the discussion has sidestepped the original issue. By contrast, asking what school music education actually lacks, whether teaching staff notation is sufficient, and how more people might encounter and understand music with multiple parts helps advance our understanding. Of course, one or two comments are not enough to establish a person’s inner motives. I am describing two ways of discussing an issue, rather than labelling everyone who disagrees.

Why, though, do some people habitually argue for the sake of arguing? Thinking about this led me to a more fundamental question: can we know what we do not know?

I felt that I might express the thought more naturally in English, so I tried putting it this way:

We don’t know what we don’t know.
We can only know what we didn’t know.

The English tenses make the relationship in time particularly clear. After acquiring some knowledge, a person looks back and suddenly realises what they did not know before. Someone may have listened to choral music for years while paying attention only to the main melody. Only when someone helps them hear how the different voices move simultaneously and respond to one another do they discover a layer of the music they had never noticed. Before coming to recognise it, they may not even have known that there was a question there worth exploring.

If we treat these two sentences as strict philosophical propositions, however, a distinction is needed. We can certainly know that there are things we do not currently know. I can say that I cannot read an orchestral score or do not understand a particular harmonic technique. This is ignorance of which I am already aware. Another situation is different: we have not encountered a field of knowledge, do not even know what questions arise within it, and therefore cannot say precisely what we lack. Only through later exposure and learning may we come to recognise those earlier blind spots.

The point, then, is not that people can never know their own ignorance. We can know that our understanding is limited, and acknowledge that there are many blind spots we have yet to discover. But acknowledging that blind spots exist is different from knowing exactly what lies within them. Some things we do not know can indeed only be discovered later.

This may explain some instances of arguing for the sake of arguing. Someone who knows little may not realise how much knowledge they lack. They can easily mistake their own familiar experience for the whole of the issue. When another person makes a judgement that extends beyond that experience, their first impulse may be to refute it rather than understand what the other person has seen.

Of course, ignorance does not inevitably lead to this kind of argument. Even someone who knows nothing about a subject can be willing to listen and learn. Arguing for its own sake may also involve face, self-esteem, group identity and the encouragement that online environments give to confrontational expression. To attribute it entirely to a lack of knowledge would itself fall short of the accuracy we are trying to pursue.

Seen this way, Zheng was addressing a specific problem in music education; the comments revealed ways of discussing a problem; and what they prompted me to consider was our awareness of the boundaries of our own knowledge. These are different levels of inquiry, but they are connected. Lacking knowledge is not in itself something to fear. The difficulty is that we sometimes fail even to notice what we lack, and when someone tries to point it out, we may rush to prove them wrong.

We cannot list in advance everything we do not know, but we can recognise that this limitation is always present. Insisting on accuracy must therefore include examining our own judgements as well as testing other people’s claims. Whether someone is truly trying to get things right ultimately depends on whether they can change their original understanding when new facts emerge.

Returning to Zheng’s remarks, I would rather ask how widespread the problems she identified in music education are, what causes them, and how they might be improved. These questions may deserve more of our time than arguing over whether a particular sentence was too strongly worded.

References
Zheng Xiaoying, “Serving as a Ferryman for Music”, People’s Daily, 10 August 2018.
https://culture.people.com.cn/n1/2018/0810/c1013-30220309.html
Zhou Haihong, “Staff Notation Should Be Promoted in School Music Education”, Guangming Daily, 11 December 2024.
https://news.cctv.cn/2024/12/11/ARTIHHdidyXKXiSXcCHgXOoM241211.shtml
UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage: Grand song of the Dong ethnic group.
https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/grand-song-of-the-dong-ethnic-group-00202