Introduction All aspects of out life are influenced by and determined by knowledge. Our life is based on and depends upon out knowledge about things and processes, people and social relations, etc. Thus, the metaphor of knowledge has a different meaning for people from different social classes and backgrounds, for people of different professions and educational different opportunities, for a pragmatic and romantic person. The paper will examine two opposing metaphors: knowledge and ignorance. Discussion The metaphor of knowledge can be explained as a way of knowing about something and acquired information about events and processes. Each person has access to personal knowledge that others–including experts and loved ones–lack and cannot possibly obtain. A nutritionist, for example, does not know what foods my family and I like the taste of, are allergic to, or can prepare, store, afford, and find in the local market. I am saying nothing about such claims. It may well be true that most of what we know is made possible by a shared and “socially constructed” conceptual structure. But however we obtain our personal knowledge, the analysis presented here focuses entirely on the fact that this knowledge is unique to each of us and is largely inaccessible to others. The first-order problem of knowledge arises from the fact that access to personal (and local) knowledge-regardless of its source–is highly restricted (Doren 44). For a pragmatic person, knowledge is the only possible way to understand the world around us and prosper in life. For a romantic person, knowledge can be seen as a universal truth and ways we see the world. One reason is that most of what we know is tacit or inarticulate knowledge. You may be very adept at performing some task, say, driving a car or playing a musical instrument, and be entirely unable to explain to someone else how such a task should be performed. Or you may be intimately familiar with a portion of a city and yet, when asked by a stranger for directions, be entirely unable to explain accurately how to find a place that you would have no difficulty finding yourself. When we are unable to articulate what we know, we sometimes try to convey our knowledge by showing others how we do it. Law professors, for example, do not normally try to teach the method of legal reasoning by explaining how lawyers reason, but by demonstrating it and compelling their students to try to replicate the method (Maturana and Varela 65). The metaphor of ignorance is connected with lack of knowledge about something: it can be lack of knowledge about etiquette or communication principles, lack of professional knowledge and skills. For instance, for a pragmatic person, lack of knowledge about etiquette will be the main problem in communication. Thus, for a non-practical person, this situation will course any problem in communication. Ignorance can be a direct result of poor education and upbringing, different social and cultural norms of the community. For instance, for a high class poor knowledge of classical music and painting is often considered as ignorance (Doren 48). Thus, for a low class these problems are not considered as poor education. Local knowledge is public and therefore potentially accessible to others. Despite this, because it is costly to gain access to such knowledge, as a practical matter access to all local knowledge is limited. In a very real way, we are all “experts” in some domain of local knowledge