Reflections About Non-knowledge in Planning Processes

During a planning process for strategic anthropic decisions that will invest a territory, or an environmental system, or a city organization, we deal with many data, many results of very different analyses. In an abstract way we could represent this huge amount of results and data as the set of what we know, but beside this set at least an equivalent set exists about what we don’t know. What we don’t know exists in the precise time we are deciding. It is something that could be extremely useful to catch instead, so to avoid wrong decisions when designing a hypothetical plan or strategic document. Therefore, we deal with what we know, with our knowledge: yet, invisibly, we also deal with our non-knowledge. Here we intend non-knowledge as a further step beyond uncertainty, as already studied in literature. In fact such non-knowledge set is not something ambiguous occurring when coping with in ill structured hypotheses to include what is uncertain. Indeed, it is something surely we do not know, as occurring e.g. when dealing with something we do not imagine that our decisions may trigger. How to define the set of what is not known? This is a position paper, and the objective of this reflection is to envision possible modeling perspectives able to simulate the activation of invisible relations that exist among the two sets. They are things we don’t know but that are unpredictably linked to things we know. A very first draft of a neural-ontological approach is proposed as possible method to cope this issue.