From the First Thoughts blog, Joe Carter on his Zizek Problem:

“I think I’ve stumbled upon a problem that is both common among scholars, intellectuals, and intellectually curious generalists (the category I fall into) and yet rarely discussed.

The fact that they don’t talk about it could mean, of course, that it’s only a problem for me. Or it could be that other people know the answer to the problem and have considered it too obvious to be worth mentioning. Then again, they may see the problem too but not talk about it for fear that other scholars, intellectuals, and intellectually curious generalists will think they are boneheads.

This type of hemming-and-hawing is tangentially related to the problem in question: How do you know whether you should really know about something that other people already seem to know?

What I mean is that there are not only different types of knowledge, but differing assumptions about what sort of knowledge is expected to be know. For instance, there is broad base of knowledge that almost all well-rounded, highly educated share in common. There is also specific area knowledge that is known almost exclusively by people with a PhD in the relevant field of study. In the middle is the grey area, the knowledge that even if you don’t know, you know that it is something that you should probably expect to know if you hang around scholars, intellectuals, and intellectually curious generalists (let’s call them SIICGs, for short).”

……

“The problem is not an unwillingness to do my homework (though the Lacanian stuff is a bit off-putting). I’m willing to put in the effort if the result will be worth it. But therein lies the crux of the problem. How do you know ahead of time whether it’s worth it? How do you know that he isn’t merely a philosopher du jour and that by the time you are well-versed enough to hold your own in a discussion that the SSIICs will not have moved on to someone else?”

Be sure to read the comments on this one.