Knowing you know

I’ve been watching, and not entirely enjoying, BBC2’s “Christmas University Challenge” series, in which supposedly distinguished mature alumni take part. All too often I’ve been appalled at the ignorance of former students of prestigious institutions who have gone on in adult life to hold influential positions, many of them in the media, education, popular culture, or as “policy advisers” of some description. It’s not as though any of them slunk out of the University of Billericay with a 2:2 in sociowaffle or psychobabble. No, we’re talking the likes of Oxford or UCL here. Worrying.

A few nights ago we were treated to the unedifying spectacle of a woman with a fancy name who couldn’t distinguish between Caravaggio, Constable and Whistler, and was evidently proud of her ignorance. In the same episode we witnessed a shameless old duffer who thought that sulphur dioxide was an aromatic hydrocarbon. OK, not generally important in the scheme of things, and you can bluff your way through life without it, but if you really can’t make a halfway intelligent guess, please do us all a favour and keep stumm. If these are the sort of people who are helping to mould our present and guide our future as a nation, people who determine taste and decide what is important, what is allowed to succeed and what isn’t, then God help us.

Well, bang on cue, last night, God was on the winning side, in the form of a first rate Leeds team (a no nonsense place, Leeds) led by the splendidly polymathic and multitalented Reverend Richard Coles, vicar of Finedon, Northamptonshire. Unlike some student finalists of recent years who have made great and extremely irritating play out of reasoning aloud the route to their brilliant (but not always correct) answers, on most occasions the Rev Coles instantly, unhesitatingly, gave the right answer. He simply just knew, and he knew he knew. A reflex buttressed by certainty. His colleague, Mr Gee, was likewise blessed with access to a deep and wide fund of correct information.  These two contestants were a joy to behold; one wanted them to win. They deserved to win, and they did.

“Knowing you know” provides a feeling not dissimilar to the one you get when you recognise something significant against an unimportant background, or when you finally retrieve a word after an infuriating period of tip-of-the-tongue inaccessibility. Disturbingly, one sometimes gets the same sensation of certainty when one’s answer is incorrect.

“University Challenge”, as well as being entertaining, can teach us a few things about different levels and types of “knowing”. In English we have just the one key verb, to know - while French, for instance, makes the distinction between savoir and connaître, German likewise between wissen and kennen - to imply knowing a fact or being acquainted with someone or something. However, in any language there is a whole menagerie of species of “knowing”, from an intuitive ‘I absolutely know that perfectly, spot on’ right down to ‘haven’t the faintest’ and ‘don’t even understand the question’. At the top end we have the Rev Coles’ certain and instinctive knowledge, really knowing, as we might say, and at the other end, oh dear, the embarrassing Caravaggio woman, or the contestant who offers a facetious answer, or the one who more sensibly and modestly mutters “pass”.

Between the extremes of knowledgeability are gradations of uncertainty and imprecision and of acceptable and unacceptable error. Here there’s space only to highlight a few of these. There’s the calculated but obvious guess, for instance; there’s “almost right”; and there’s “It’s wrong, but I know why you said that”. Often, in “University Challenge” it appears unrealistic that one would be expected to know the answer in the deeply certain “I know I know” sense, but rather the assumption is that one will be familiar – somehow – with the components and characteristics of a style, a generality, and be able to deduce accordingly. One will recognise the fragment of a language, half of someone’s name, the penumbra of something one really does know. The music and picture rounds frequently work this way; one may have never previously encountered that particular Chopin nocturne or that Pissarro landscape, but one will be able to make an informed guess from what one does know. A musical work will sound Russian or French; a painting will look Dutch or Italian. You don’t know quite why or how, but it does. Other clues are provided and immediately the options narrow; Gerd Gigerenzer is one researcher who has demonstrated how sometimes it’s better not to know too much. A little knowledge may, in this instance, be less dangerous than a little more. If the only Group 1 element you’ve heard of is sodium you aren’t going to be led astray by rubidium.

Indeed, chemistry questions often focus on the periodic table and here, in nearly every case, and unlike Gigerenzer’s findings as applied above, you will need to really know your subject matter. If you’ve never heard of rubidium you won’t be able to guess it. Likewise with quantum mechanics, Shakespeare, exoplanets or complex numbers. All right, ‘the square root of minus one’ may do the trick once in a while. The picture questions, meanwhile, often involve putting a name to a map location and here it’s notable how older contestants, and those with a background in factually intensive subjects, tend to score. The habitual sub-letting of knowledge from cerebral cortex to Google-enabled gadget soon shows through in a contest like this. Knowing that you can “look it up” is no help here; no, it has to be inside, on board, and rapidly retrievable. Traditionally, of course, a claimed ignorance of geography is a marker of superiority amongst a certain type of person. Science likewise. What the bloody hell’s tungsten carbide? Boring, difficult, tiresome subjects best left to spotty anoraks of a Northern persuasion, right?

Wrong. It’s always interesting when a studio contestant makes the same peculiar mistake as oneself, at precisely the same moment as one shouts at the TV from the smug safety of one’s sofa. So often, it seems, the correct answer is the only landmark “fact” both oneself and the contestant - worried by bright lights, stage fright, and a frowning Paxman - knows from within a desert of factual ignorance. Whether it’s history, physics, classical music, literature, or whatever the subject area. “The Holy Roman Emperor”, “Bannockburn”, “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle” (no, wrong, “Schrödinger’s Cat”, damn), “Smetana” or “Ibsen” extracted successfully out of acres of utter cluelessness. Those “1066 and all that” factoids that one remembers – Alfred burning the cakes, Trotsky and the ice axe – retrieved from the greater unknown. What, really, do we ever learn properly? What do we know? What do we know we know? What and why?

 
As my good and learned friend would say. Indeed. Absolutely.