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The attempt to distinguish knowledge by acquaintance from knowledge by description is most closely associated with Bertrand Russell.The distinction is also crucial to one way of trying to develop a plausible foundationalist theory of justification and knowledge. First, what is meant by “acquaintance” and“description”? 0000003878 00000 n
Thus in the presence of my table I am acquainted with the sense-data that make up the appearance of my table—its colour, shape, hardness, smoothness, etc. We have therefore to consider acquaintance with other things besides sense-data if we are to obtain any tolerably adequate analysis of our knowledge. Nevertheless there are some reasons for thinking that we are acquainted with the ‘I’, though the acquaintance is hard to disentangle from other things. Here all the words are abstract except ‘German’. It is obvious that we often remember what we have seen or heard or had otherwise present to our senses, and that in such cases we are still immediately aware of what we remember, in spite of the fact that it appears as past and not as present. Let us take some illustrations. We know that the man with the iron mask existed, and many propositions are known about him; but we do not know who he was. But if we are to obtain a description which we know to be applicable, we shall be compelled, at some point, to bring in a reference to a particular with which we are acquainted. But here, as in the case of particulars, knowledge concerning what is known by description is ultimately reducible to knowledge concerning what is known by acquaintance. It does not seem necessary to suppose that we are acquainted with a more or less permanent person, the same to-day as yesterday, but it does seem as though we must be acquainted with that thing, whatever its nature, which sees the sun and has acquaintance with sense-data. Assuming that there is such a thing as direct acquaintance with oneself, Bismarck himself might have used his name directly to designate the particular person with whom he was acquainted. According to this outline, knowledge by acquaintance forms the bedrock for all of our other knowledge. Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description I. What goes on in the minds of others is known to us through our perception of their bodies, that is, through the sense-data in us which are associated with their bodies. 0000007325 00000 n
The question whether we are also acquainted with our bare selves, as opposed to particular thoughts and feelings, is a very difficult one, upon which it would be rash to speak positively. There is a similar hierarchy in the region of universals. On Our Knowledge of General Principles, 13. We may therefore sum up as follows what has been said concerning acquaintance with things that exist. Thus, knowledge by description allows us to infer knowledge about the actual world via the things that can be known to us, things with which we have direct acquaintance (our subjective sense-data). 4 Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description . Apart from the information we convey to others, apart from the fact about the actual Bismarck, which gives importance to our judgement, the thought we really have contains the one or more particulars involved, and otherwise consists wholly of concepts. Thus ‘a man’ is an ambiguous description, and ‘the man with the iron mask’ is a definite description. 3. But, for the sake of illustration, let us assume that we think of him as ‘the first Chancellor of the German Empire’. It is, of course, very much a matter af chance which characteristics of a man’s appearance will come into a friend’s mind when he thinks of him; thus the description actually in the friend’s mind is accidental. These are progressively further removed from acquaintance with particulars; the first comes as near to acquaintance as is possible in regard to another person; in the second, we shall still be said to know ‘who Bismarck was’; in the third, we do not know who was the man with the iron mask, though we can know many propositions about him which are not logically deducible from the fact that he wore an iron mask; in the fourth, finally, we know nothing beyond what is logically deducible from the definition of the man. 0000006608 00000 n
We have spoken of acquaintance with the contents of our minds as self-consciousness, but it is not, of course, consciousness of our self: it is consciousness of particular thoughts and feelings. Sense-data, as we have already seen, are among the things with which we are acquainted; in fact, they supply the most obvious and striking example of knowledge by acquaintance. Suppose some statement made about Bismarck. ; Fales 199… For example, ‘the most long-lived of men’ is a description involving only universals, which must apply to some man, but we can make no judgements concerning this man which involve knowledge about him beyond what the description gives. We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge of truths. When I am acquainted with ‘my seeing the sun’, it seems plain that I am acquainted with two different things in relation to each other.