It’s possible to understand something in a vague sense, but not really think through the implications of it because you don’t want to deal with those implications. Ayn Rand referred to this sort of thing as a “blank-out” in her work. Here’s her talking about it:
Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think—not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict “It is.” Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say “It is,” you are refusing to say “I am.” By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: “Who am I to know?” he is declaring: “Who am I to live?”– Ayn Rand, Galt Speech
For certain kinds of knowledge, related to, say, the value of certain relationships, or the value of going to school, etc., there is a psychological impediment to thinking very clearly that arises specifically because of the reach of those ideas and the reach of changing them. One can recognize that there are problems with the interactions one has with individuals in one’s life, or that one doesn’t really enjoy going to school, etc. But thinking clearly might cause one’s life to change in complex and scary-seeming ways (causing schisms with lovers or relatives, dropping out of school), and lead to what seems like lots more problems; this seems overwhelming and dizzying. Hence, blank-out.
It doesn’t matter whether or not one’s ideas are inexplicit or explicit — blank-out can still happen. “Knowing” a formal system of arguments for a proposition means very little if one cannot apply this knowledge outside a very narrow domain. The slightest deviation from that formal system and your understanding turns out to be shaky. This happens in math and can happen in morality.
One has to remember though, that identifying problems is never a bad thing — that is knowledge and thus progress. When dealing with stuff that’s potentially life-changing, the alternative to identifying big problems and dealing with them isn’t an ignorance-is-bliss problem-free existence. It’s having a shittier life.
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