In his conundrum yesterday, Andy so eloquently stated the problem with seeking knowledge when one is not aware what knowledge they ought to seek, or if they are aware of it, do they not already then have that knowledge. I found this intriguing because he makes a good point, but I do believe one can find answers for his questions if one only thinks about them. To begin, I have made a conclusion some years ago as to what knowledge is and the exact nature of it. Knowledge in my mind is a bias made of an otherwise blank memory. This means more simply stated that everything one learns is biassing him toward a fact he had not thought about or not thought about in that way. For example, let us say that someone tells me some inaccurate fact that I never really thought of before like that the British taught Indians to scalp. Since I knew nothing of it before I was told this, afterward I shall be biassed in reasoning that scalping was taught to the Indians by the British, and this will thus eliminate all of my other potential beliefs about how they learned it. Like I probably will not have the idea so much that Martians taught them, or that the French did, or that other Indians or that they learned it from themselves, I am not biassed with the idea that it was indeed taught to them by the British.
Having heard this fact from a layman however, it takes little effort for a Professor specialising in indigenous American culture to convince me that archaeological evidence exists that the Indians have been doing this for much longer before the British or any other Europeans arrived. I am not saying that either of these facts are correct, but that I am biassed in thinking one way about them, because learning does that. I am not saying that one's beliefs and therefore cognitive biases can not be dispelled, in fact, I am stating clearly that I believe they can under proper circumstances. Sometimes, however, it is much harder to dissuade people from these biases in things that seem more elementary to them. Saying to someone that 2+2=4 is wrong will likely get them seriously doubting you and sticking to their most essential biases about arithmetic because it is so very fundamental in their view of the world, and easily provable that the above stated equation is correct. They can easily prove to you at that point that if you take two of any given object and add two more of the same sort of object that one does actually have four of those same objects altogether.
This may seem simple and boring, but I think it establishes the fundamental belief I hold that knowledge is bias towards a given abstract thought. This being said, I think it is safe to say that there are different levels of knowledge about a given subject. For example in my field of research most people tend to have the vaguest notions that grammar exists, everyone uses words all the time, and though they may not conscientiously think about it, they always put these words in a particular order (or with certain affix markers on them) to make sense to both themselves and other speakers, and they would definitely know if something were amiss with this system. This may be all they know about it, especially if they are illiterate. Usually in our culture, they teach a basic sort of grammar early on, and they identify things like parts of speech (nouns, verbs, etc.) and maybe even basic word order (SVO Subject Verb Object). This is simply drawing on things that we as English speakers already inherently know and understand, and if we thought about it on our own, we may come to the same results, that there are things like nouns and verbs and so forth.
Moving on, when someone learns a single foreign language, depending on the language and their teacher (and the teacher's style and content etc), one develops a higher understanding of grammar. They learn things like different structures of language, like inflection (word marking languages), or a different form of syntax (word order) and so forth. Knowing all of this is out there, they may begin to think about language differently, and may go out to find other foreign languages that they heard and believe exist, but they only know the name of, and after taking another class, they may find there are other aspects that the first two languages had in common, but this language does not. Learning all of this, they may take advanced Morphology (parts of words [roots, affixes]) and syntax courses. They may go on to learn much more about the field, like linguistic theory, or theoretical grammar charts and things like that, which parse sentences and phrases and so forth. Of course, they know these things exist, and as they go, they learn there are other things out there they do not know about, so they set out to learn about them, and once learning that much they learn there is more.
I suppose this is a lot of information, but I am trying to basically say that knowledge comes from knowing some about something, but not everything, and knowing that certain things exist within a vaguer field, one can then pursue and try to learn more about those things. I do not know if this answers Andy's question, but it is a field I have a deep interest in myself.