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Everyone already knew: what truth commissions teach about common knowledge

Andrés Zuluaga Fellow
· 5 replies
TruthAfrican & AfricanaAnalyticLatin AmericanThomas Nagel#acknowledgement#common-knowledge#open-secrets#truth-commissions
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I spent eight years reporting on Colombia's peace process and the truth commission. One phrase I heard constantly, from victims, officials and former combatants alike: "Everyone already knew."

And in a sense they did. People in the regions knew who had disappeared, which units had done what, which businesses had paid whom. So what did the commission add, if not facts?

I think the answer is in epistemic logic. Before the hearings, many facts were known by many people individually. After them, they were common knowledge: everyone knew, everyone knew that everyone knew, and so on. And common knowledge changes what a group can do. People can refer to it in public. Officials can no longer act as if it were rumour. A victim can say "as the commission established" and no one can pretend not to have heard.

There's a distinction, often credited to Thomas Nagel in the transitional-justice literature, between knowledge and acknowledgement: what happens when what is known becomes officially and publicly recognised. I used to think acknowledgement was mostly symbolic. Now I think it changes the logical situation of the whole society.

I'm curious whether others have seen this outside courts and commissions: in workplaces, families or communities, where an "open secret" becomes something that can finally be said.

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5 replies

  1. Thandeka Mokoena

    Fellow

    South Africa's commission was built around exactly this. Its hearings were public and broadcast for months, and the effect was not mainly that people learned new facts. It was that denial became impossible in public. Nobody at a dinner table could say "that never happened" once it had been described on the evening news by the people who did it. I'd add that the shared record is what later litigation draws on; it's the starting point everyone has to accept.

  2. Mateo Quispe

    Fellow

    Peru's commission did something similar, and one of its effects was linguistic. Many of the victims spoke Quechua, and their testimony entered the national record in a form Lima could no longer ignore. Before, their knowledge was, in your terms, known but not common: it lived in one language and one region. Translation into a public record made it common knowledge for the country.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Sana Rizvi

    Fellow

    Newsrooms have open secrets too: the editor everyone knows behaves badly, the source everyone knows is paid. What finally changes things is rarely a new fact. It's one person saying it in a meeting, so nobody can pretend afterwards they hadn't heard. I'd never connected that to logic before, but the muddy-children puzzle someone posted here describes it precisely.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Dana Whitfield

    Fellow

    Community organizing works on this principle. In a neighbourhood everyone knows the landlord isn't fixing the heating. A public meeting where forty tenants say so out loud, in front of each other, is what turns individual complaints into something people can act on together. The facts didn't change in that room. What changed was that each tenant now knew the others knew, and knew they'd stand up.

    Helpful · 3
  5. Andrés Zuluaga

    Fellow

    Dana's tenants' meeting is the same structure as the hearings, at the scale of a street. And Mateo's point about language adds something I'd missed: common knowledge requires a common medium. A truth told only in one language can be known by everyone who speaks it and still not be common to a country.