I don't know whether this kind of framework already exists, but here I go.
It seems to me that there (at least) three categories of states of ignorance of explanations of phenomena, distinct from the usual "known-knowns, known-unknowns, unknown-knowns and unknown-unknowns".
The first one is the most self explanatory: I, as an individual, might not know what the answer is. I could probably just look it up on Google. Example: why does it rain? How far is it from here to Sydney? When was the first James Bond film released?
The second one is, we, as a civilization, don't know the answer, but it seems within the range of resolvability. We known the answer will be relatively mundane: it may surprise us, but it won't radically change how we model how the universe works. It'll be an exact figure, or a yes or a no, or an explanatory model that fits with previous models. Maybe it's just a hard problem, or we haven't invested enough resources into figuring it out. Example: why do we require sleep? How do we sustain an artificial fusion reaction such that you get more energy out than you put in? How many species of insect are there?
The third one, which I find the most interesting: we, as a civilization, are actually unsure what an answer or explanatory model would look like! The question just seems so profound, so confusing, it seemingly eludes our attempts at understanding it. It's hard to formulate a sentence that could at least plausibly suffice as an explanation. Examples: what is qualia? Why is there something rather than nothing, whether that be our universe or the multiverse?
I'm actually having a hard time coming up with a third one, please leave a comment if you have another example. But it's has to be like really, really mysterious: where the heck the aliens are doesn't fit this criteria, as as I could easily construct sentence that could turn out to be true, such as "abiogenesis is sufficiently improbable such that the closest other origin of life lies outside the Hubble Sphere".
PS. I'm aware that some people would disagree that we could not come up with a plausible sounding answer for my last two examples, see Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, and A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.
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