Knowledge by Acquaintance

While there is no shortage of philosophical literature discussing knowledge by acquaintance, there is a surprising dearth of work about theories of epistemic justification based on direct acquaintance. This paper explores a basic framework for a thoroughly general account of epistemic justification by acquaintance. I argue that this approach to epistemic justification satisfies two importance aspects (objective and subjective) of justification. After sketching how the acquaintance approach can meet both objective and subjective aspects for epistemic justification, I will outline how this general account of justification by acquaintance can be applied to the analysis of justification for many types of beliefs (e.g., non-inferential, inferential, a priori, empirical justification, etc.). Finally, some of the objections to the acquaintance approach will be considered and answered.

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. 

The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound.

Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward.

I will be talking about the limits of cognitive science. I won’t be talking about contingent shortcomings that could perhaps be remedied with, say, more time, resources, or ingenuity. Rather, I will be concerned with limitations that are “baked into” the very enterprise. The main blind spot, I will argue, is consciousness—but not for the reasons typically given...

This is the introductory essay to the collection of essays: 'Acquaintance: New Essays' (eds. Knowles & Raleigh, forthcoming, OUP). In this essay I provide some historical background to the concept of acquaintance. I examine various Russellian theses about acquaintance that contemporary acquaintance theorists may wish to reject. I consider a number of questions that acquaintance theorists face. I provide a survey of current debates in philosophy where acquaintance has recently been invoked. And I also provide brief summaries of the other essays in this volume.

First (§1) I isolate the form of acquaintance that interests me, and next (§2) note some of its key epistemological and metaphysical features. Then (§3) I explore a promising metaphysical framework for naturalising acquaintance, higher-order theories of consciousness, and argue that existing variations within the framework are not up to the job. I go on (§4) to set out my own variant of a higher-order theory, and explain how it successfully approximates acquaintance. Since this model can be implemented physically, it is a way of rendering acquaintance perfectly natural.

This thesis aims at laying the groundwork for a research program in philosophy of mind by arguing for two theoretical positions, internalism and representationalism (intentionalism), which are rarely defended jointly, but which together can form the basis for a plausible theory of the mind.

The first chapter argues for internalism against the dominant externalist view. Firstly, it is discussed what the best way is to elucidate the debate between internalism and externalism rooted in the Twin Earth thought experiment. (Putnam 1975) It is argued that the issue between internalists and externalists is whether concrete items that stand in a referential relation to mental states are among the constitutive bases of mental states. The Dry Earth thought experiment (Boghossian 1998) is introduced to make a case for internalism, relying on concepts that do not refer. Externalist counter-arguments are introduced and rejected.

The second chapter argues for representationalism/intentionalism against qualia theory. It is argued that there are no mental qualities (qualia) that account for the qualitative aspects of phenomenology. What do account for the qualitative aspects of phenomenology are apparent qualities of the intentional objects of conscious experiences, the qualities the world is represented as having by the experiences. Three sets of arguments for qualia are introduced and rejected. The first set of arguments are the type of arguments that are variants of the argument from error, which are rejected by an intentionalist analysis of mentality, and an epistemology of experience is developed where experience provides an acquaintance relation between a subject and something abstract such as a possibility. This makes it unnecessary to postulate epistemic relations both to concretely instantiated items in the environment and to mental items such as qualia or sense-data. Arguments based on allegedly non-representational states such as double vision and afterimages are shown to fail by demonstrating that such states are non-endorsed representations. Arguments that rely on spectrum inversion cases where representational content allegedly differs while qualitative phenomenology stays the same are rejected by arguing against the account of representation that underlies such arguments. (The order of the two chapters is largely arbitrary, though a rejection of externalism is useful in arguing against the argument from spectrum inversion.)

The account is completed by briefly discussing and rejecting the disjunctivist theory of perception, and some other motivations for externalism such as externalism’s advantage in providing a naturalistic account of mentality is discussed. The thesis concludes by pointing at the naturalistic prospects for an account of mentality that analyses mental states as representational states while the representational content is based neither on mental qualities like qualia, nor on causal-informational relations to environmental items. I further speculate about the role of powers and dispositions of organisms that might underpin a future naturalistic analysis of mentality, and also consider the plausibility of a mysterian account of mind where the special mystery regarding the explanatory gap about consciousness is downgraded by suggesting that explanatory gaps might be widespread in nature, such as in our failure to logically link qualities like color and sound as we experience them to the lower-level physical phenomena they supervene on.

Much attention has recently been paid to the idea, which I label 'External World Acquaintance' (EWA), that the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is partially constituted by external features. One motivation for EWA which has received relatively little discussion is its alleged ability to help deal with the 'Explanatory Gap' (e.g. Fish 2008, 2009, Langsam 2011, Allen 2016). I provide a reformulation of this general line of thought, which makes clearer how and when EWA could help to explain the specific phenomenal nature of visual experience. In particular, I argue that by focusing on the different kinds of perceptual actions that are available in the case of visual spatial vs. colour perception, we get a natural explanation for why we should expect the specific nature of colour phenomenology to remain less readily intelligible than the specific nature of visual spatial phenomenology. (Forthcoming in Synthese.)

This paper suggests that reference to phenomenal qualities is best understood as involving iconicity, that is, a passage from sign-vehicle to object that exploits a similarity between the two. This contrasts with a version of the ‘phenomenal concept strategy’ that takes indexicality to be central. However, since it is doubtful that phenomenal qualities are capable of causally interacting with anything, indexical reference seems inappropriate. While a theorist like David Papineau is independently coming to something akin to iconicity, I think some of the awkwardness that plagues his account would be remedied by transitioning to a more inclusive philosophy of signs.

Why does Mary learn something when she leaves the room? One answer, endorsed by some physicalists as well as most dualists, is as follows. Mary learns something because phenomenal knowledge requires direct acquaintance with phenomenal properties. For this reason, there is an epistemic gap between the physical and the phenomenal: phenomenal facts cannot be deduced from physical facts. This is the acquaintance response to the Knowledge Argument. The physicalist and dualist versions of the acquaintance response diverge as to whether this epistemic gap reveals an ontological gap between the physical and the phenomenal. I argue that the acquaintance response casts doubt on two claims often made on behalf of physicalism: that physicalism is more parsimonious than dualism, and that no plausible view about mental causation is compatible with dualism. The paper has three sections. Section 1 explicates the acquaintance response and outlines Acquaintance Physicalism, the position that combines the acquaintance response with physicalism. In Section 2, I argue that physicalism's claim to greater parsimony is less straightforward than usually assumed, and that the commitments of Acquaintance Physicalism present special obstacles to invoking parsimony in an argument for physicalism. And I show that on an alternative interpretation of parsimony (Sober 2015), physicalism is not more parsimonious than dualism per se. Section 3 shows how acknowledging the phenomenon of acquaintance can ease the dualist's problems with mental causation, by dispelling three key objections to epiphenomenalism. The most challenging of these objections is that epiphenomenalism blocks an evolutionary explanation of the fact that events beneficial to the organism are generally pleasurable while harmful events are generally painful. In response, I draw on the relation of acquaintance to describe how pleasures and pains, while themselves epiphenomenal, might nonetheless explain positive and negative associations with stimuli. Because these associations affect behavior, they can contribute to fitness. I close by arguing that epiphenomenalism does not threaten human agency.

This chapter examines Bertrand Russell's developing views--roughly from 1911 to 1918--on the nature of introspective knowledge and subjects most basic knowledge of themselves as themselves. It argues that Russell's theory of introspection distinguishes between direct awareness of individual psychological objects and features, the presentation of psychological complexes involving those objects and features, and introspective judgments which aim to correspond with them. It also explores his transition from believing that subjects enjoy introspective self-acquaintance, to believing that they only know themselves by self-description, and eventually to believing that self-knowledge is a logical construction. It concludes by sketching how Russell's views about introspection and self-knowledge change as a result of his adoption of neutral monism. Along the way, it sheds additional light on his acquaintance-based theory of knowledge, preference for logical constructions over inferred entities, and gradual progression towards neutral monism.

It seems like experience plays a positive—even essential—role in generating some knowledge. The problem is, it’s not clear what that role is. To see this, suppose that when my visual system takes in information about the world it skips the experience step and just immediately generates beliefs in me about my surroundings. A lot of philosophers think that I would still know, via perception, about the world around me. But then that raises the question: How does experience contribute to my having knowledge of my surroundings? Philosophers have given many different answers to this question. In this paper I offer and defend a different answer that avoids the pitfalls of other answers. I argue that experience is, all by itself, a kind of knowledge—what Russell (1912) calls “knowledge of things”. So I argue that experience helps generate knowledge simply by being knowledge.

In this paper, I argue against the phenomenal concept strategy (henceforth PCS) and in favor of what Chalmers has called type-A materialism ([2006], [2010] p. 111). On her release, Mary makes no cognitive discovery at all; not even a thin non-possibility-eliminating discovery, as Tye has recently claimed [2012]. When she is imprisoned, Mary already knows everything that is to be known about the phenomenal character of her experiences. What Mary acquires is a new non-cognitive and nonconceptual representation.

In this paper I examine Russell’s account of memory in both the acquaintance and the neutral monist periods, more specifically, the years
from 1910 until 1927, with emphasis on The Problems of Philosophy, Theory of Knowledge, and The Analysis of Mind. I argue that memory is central for understanding how knowledge works, which is the main reason it remained in the focus of Russell’s analysis even after the gradual shift to neutral monism. I propose that memory played a not insignificant role in that shift. While this paper aims to show that Russell’s theory of memory in the acquaintance period faced serious difficulties—mainly related to the commitment to direct realism—I argue that there is a consistent similarity and continuity between the theory of memory in the acquaintance period and that in the neutral monist period. Russell considered a similar type of memory to be paradigmatic and epistemically primary in both periods—a consideration, dictated, no doubt, by his commitment to the principles of Occam’s razor and psychological plausibility.

Can a belief source confer justification when we lack antecedent justification for believing that it’s reliable? A negative answer quickly leads to skepticism. A positive answer, however, seems to commit one to allowing pernicious reasoning known as “epistemic bootstrapping.” Puzzles surrounding bootstrapping arise because we illicitly assume either that justification requires doxastic awareness of a source’s epistemic credentials or that there is no requirement that a subject be aware of these credentials. We can resolve the puzzle by splitting the horns and requiring a non-conceptual awareness of, or direct acquaintance with, a source’s legitimacy. Requiring non-conceptual as opposed to doxastic awareness halts the regress and avoids the skeptical results. On the other hand, requiring non-conceptual awareness also guarantees that we are aware of evidence for a source’s reliability prior to using that source to form justified beliefs; we thereby avoid the problem of allowing epistemic bootstrapping to generate the illicit gains in justification.

This study, a 1999 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Texas at Austin, explores the way that Plato uses images and themes from the Mystery Religions in explaining his theory of knowledge in the Republic, Symposium, and Phaedrus. Themes of 'purification' from the Lesser Mysteries reflect psychic purification via Socratic cross-examination and other methods necessary in order to acquire knowledge, while themes of revelation and the unveiling of the Mysteries reflect the unmediated contact that constitutes knowledge of a Form.

The subject of this theoretical study, namely, the problem of knowing the other in social discourse, is of" course extensive and crucia! to every discipline and social science. My study does not try to present all the important or even the best materials on this subject. Instead, it tries to narrow as well as to penetrate one, minor contemporary, sociological theory of how we know another in social discourse. The assumption is that the more thoughtfu! we are in this respect the stronger our contribution will be to social inquiry.

say more about how exactly we should understand the technical notion of 'perceptual acquaintance' in § 2 of this paper. 2 Qualia internalism is the view that any duplicate of a subject will have the same qualitative experience regardless of the environment that he or she is in. Qualia externalism, on the Brought to you by |

I am aware of the rain outside, but only in virtue of looking at a weather report. I am aware of my friend, but only because I hear her voice through my phone. Thus, there are some things that I’m aware of, but only indirectly. Many philosophers believe that there are also some things of which I am directly aware (i.e., acquainted). The most plausible candidates are experiences such as pains, tickles, visual sensations, etc. In fact, the philosophical consensus seems to be that experiences are the only plausible candidates for acquaintance. But I will argue that we are also acquainted with ourselves. After outlining what it means to be acquainted with oneself, I will introduce, develop, and defend a commonly used test for acquaintance. Then I will apply this test to us and show that we pass. I will consider various objections to my argument. But ultimately I will conclude that we can be, and often are, acquainted with ourselves.

The question of how curiosity and knowledge are related brings about a host of interesting philosophical issues, the most important of which relates to what curiosity is. After all the classical “definition” equates curiosity with a desire to know. There is then the important comparative logical question: If knowledge is a propositional attitude, is curiosity so too? There are also issues concerning how curiosity relates not to knowledge, but rather its opposite, namely ignorance. What are the mental mechanisms we employ which allow us to become aware of our ignorance on a particular issue, and how does this motivate curiosity? Is awareness of ignorance a precondition for
curiosity? I have dealt with these and other related issues in detail in recent work. (Inan, I. The Philosophy of Curiosity. New York, London: Routledge, 2012.) Based on some of the ideas developed there, I now wish to elaborate on topics which should be relevant not just to virtue epistemology, but to epistemology in general, and especially to formal epistemology. These involve how curiosity relates to some of our basic epistemic attitudes that come short of knowledge. Among them two stand out as being the most relevant, that is belief and acquaintance. How does curiosity relate to the holding of a belief that is uncertain and how does it relate to having partial acquaintance with an
object?

Can art, religion, or philosophy afford ineffable insights? If so, what are they? The idea of ineffability has puzzled philosophers from Laozi to Wittgenstein. In Ineffability and its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion and Philosophy, Silvia Jonas examines different ways of thinking about what ineffable insights might involve metaphysically, and shows which of these are in fact incoherent. Jonas discusses the concepts of ineffable properties and objects, ineffable propositions, ineffable content, and ineffable knowledge, examining the metaphysical pitfalls involved in these concepts. Ultimately, she defends the idea that ineffable insights as found in aesthetic, religious, and philosophical contexts are best understood in terms of self-acquaintance, a particular kind of non-propositional knowledge. Ineffability as a philosophical topic is as old as the history of philosophy itself, but contributions to the exploration of ineffability have been sparse. The theory developed by Jonas makes the concept tangible and usable in many different philosophical contexts.

It is widely supposed that if there is to be a plausible connection between the truth of a de re attitude report about a subject and that subject's possession of a singular thought, then 'acquaintance'-style requirements on singular thought must be rejected. I show that this belief rests on poorly motivated claims about how we talk about the attitudes. I offer a framework for propositional attitude reports which provides both attractive solutions to recalcitrant puzzle cases and the key to preserving acquaintance constraints. The upshot is that there is an independently motivated response to the principal argument against acquaintance.

Marcus Giaquinto claims that finite cardinal numbers are sensible properties, and that the smallest ones are known by acquaintance. In this paper I compare Giaquinto’s epistemology to the Russellian one with which it invites comparison, before showing how it is subject to a version of Jody Azzouni’s “epistemic role” objection. Then I argue that the source of this problem is Giaquinto’s misconception that numbers, like quantities, are sensible properties. Finally, I offer a sketch of a theory of how we grasp finite cardinals on the assumption that they are not sensible, and show why this is not subject to the epistemic role objection.

In his Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell distinguished knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge of truths. This paper argues for a new interpretation of the relationship between these two species of knowledge. I argue that knowledge by acquaintance of an object neither suffices for knowledge that one is acquainted with the object, nor puts a subject in a position to know that she is acquainted with the object. These conclusions emerge from a thorough examination of the central role played by attention in Russell's theory of knowledge. Attention bridges the gap between knowledge by acquaintance and our capacity to form judgements about the objects of acquaintance.

Este artigo é uma nova defesa do materialismo tipo B contra o argumento do conhecimento de Jackson (1982), inspirado pela principal oposição kantiana entre conceitos e intuições sensíveis. Como todos os materialistas do tipo B, argumento que, ao sair de seu quarto preto-e-branco, Mary faz progressos cognitivos. No entanto, ao contrário da chamada estratégia de conceito fenomenal, não creio que tal progresso possa ser explicado em termos da aquisição de novos conceitos. Também rejeito a explicação recente de Tye segundo a qual o progresso cognitivo de Mary poderia ser compreendido pela aquisição de um conhecimento por contato (knowledge by acquaintance). O que é crucial não é a oposição russelliana entre conhecer coisas e conhecer verdades, mas sim a oposição kantiana entre representações conceituais e não-conceituais das mesmas propriedades. O conhecimento fenomenal de Mary é aqui explicado como o resultado da cooperação de sua recém-adquirida representação não-conceitual com uma representação conceitual que Mary já possuía de uma mesma propriedade.

Aesthetic experience seems superior to aesthetic testimony. Why? I argue that it is due to differences in their epistemic value; in what epistemic goods each one provides. Aesthetic experience, or the experience of art or other aesthetic objects, affords multiple, distinctive epistemic goods whereas aesthetic testimony affords less. In particular, it provides aesthetic knowledge of truths, a kind of propositional knowledge, as well as aesthetic knowledge of things, a kind of non-propositional knowledge. Although aesthetic experience is superior because it has more epistemic value, this doesn’t mean that it provides weaker justification for aesthetic belief than aesthetic testimony; the difference is evaluative, not normative. In this way, we can explain a key pessimistic intuition about aesthetic testimony—that it is inferior to aesthetic experience—whilst preserving the optimistic view that aesthetic testimony makes aesthetic knowledge available to others. The superior epistemic value of first-hand aesthetic experience is compatible with a number of important observations about aesthetic testimony, including the importance of aesthetic trust.

My aim in this paper is to examine how Kent Bach's theory of singular thought about material objects meets the requirements of transmitting de re thought. I identify a certain possible paradox haunting Bach's move of extending acquaintance in order to widen the scope of singular thought and I attempt to answer this possible paradox. First, I briefly present the manner in which Bach motivates extended acquaintance and which constraints he puts on it. I then address the problem of the sorites paradox which might lead not only to Bach's communication-based de re thoughts, but perception-based de re thoughts in general, thus defined. Finally, I offer my tentative solution to the problem of extended acquaintance which consists in introducing two constraints on singular thought, namely (i) the (external) acquaintance constraint and (ii) the (internal) cognitive significance constraint, and two types of representations, namely indexical-iconic representations and indexical-discursive representations which are together crucial for having a singular thought.

The term “acquaintance” denotes a relation of direct awareness of an item, a relation in which something is “presented” or simply “given” to the subject who experiences it, without the intermediary of any process of inference or any other beliefs. The acquaintance principle maintains that
aesthetic knowledge must be acquired through acquaintance, i.e. through first-hand experience of the object judged, and thus cannot be either inferred from general rules or obtained from others’ description
of the object.

Cartesian and Kantian skepticism about objects has plagued philosophy for over three hundred years, culminating into postmodern subjectivism. Bertrand Russell's notion of knowledge by acquaintance recognizes that at the foundation of knowledge are facts presented by objects to subjects. These facts present limitations, which subjects may not amend. Thus, the notion that reality is merely a social construction cannot be true. Knowledge by description, using knowledge by acquaintance as its base, provides a defense for a positive realism that posits that epistemology proceeds from ontology.

The Acquaintance Principle is the principle according to which judgements concerning the aesthetic value of a work of art made by a critic must be based on the critic’s experience(s) of acquaintance with the work itself. Some recent philosophers and artists claimed that some works of conceptual art show the principle to be false. I argue that, if properly understood, the Acquaintance Principle is a truism and that works of conceptual art do not pose any particular problem to it. I also suggest some implications of the principle for aesthetic education.

In this paper I challenge the widespread assumption that the conditions for singular reference are more or less the same as the conditions for singular thought. I claim that we refer singularly to things without thinking singularly about them more often than it is usually believed. I first argue that we should take the idea that singular thought is non-descriptive thought very seriously. If we do that, it seems that we cannot be so liberal about what counts as acquaintance; only perception (and memory) will do. I also briefly discuss and reject semantic instrumentalism. Finally, I argue that while singular reference is cheap, singular thought comes only at a price.

Many theories of the de dicto / de re ambiguity for quantifiers and descriptions follow the tradition started by Kaplan and Lewis in that they make use of notions that are epistemic in nature, such as the notion of acquaintance. This may create the impression that the question about de re in attitude report semantics should always be resolved by looking at the reported attitude; if the latter qualifies as de re according to some epistemological criteria, then also the affitude report may be true de re. The present paper aims to provide an argument to the contrary. The argument proceeds in several steps. First, we point out the existence of a wide range of de re readings (mostly already known from the literature), some of which do not target referential or quantificational expressions at all. Second, we show that the existing analyses either give wrong predictions for such cases, or are incomplete, or at least inelegant. Third, we offer a new analysis (which, as it turns out, has predecessors not united by any single tradition) whose main ingredient is the observation that the right predictions result from modifying the Context Set of the conversation in certain intuitive ways before the attitude report is added to the Common Ground. This is the semantic contribution of the paper. The philosophical upshot is that the reasons for an attitude report being de re at least in some cases have little to do with the grounds on which the corresponding mental state — the attitude itself — qualifies as de re. We also speculate as to how the proposed analysis, which divorces de re'ness from epistemic rapport, may be extended onto more traditional cases.

The present moment, NOW, is a pretty big deal to us humans. Everything seems to be happening NOW, on the razor edge between history and the future, and without a NOW through which we experience the world, the world itself seems inaccessible, if not altogether incomprehensible. But what is this NOW? Is NOW an objective feature of external reality, a uniquely privileged public moment through which we are in contact with the actual world as it unfolds, or is NOW merely a subjective illusion that we each project onto the world through the egocentric temporal window of our own experience?

In this paper I examine Russell’s account of memory in both the acquaintance and the neutral monist periods, more specifically, the years from 1910 until 1927, with emphasis on The Problems of Philosophy, Theory of Knowledge, and The Analysis of Mind. I argue that memory is central for understanding how knowledge works, which is the main reason it remained in the focus of Russell’s analysis even after the gradual shift to neutral monism. I propose that memory played a not insignificant role in that shift. While this paper aims to show that Russell’s theory of memory in the acquaintance period faced serious difficulties—mainly related to the commitment to direct realism—I argue that there is a consistent similarity and continuity between the theory of memory in the acquaintance period and that in the neutral monist period. Russell considered a similar type of memory to be paradigmatic and epistemically primary in both periods—a consideration, dictated, no doubt, by his commitment to ...

There is an interesting controversy in recent literature over the nature of Reid’s theory of perception. Interpreters are divided over whether Reid’s theory of perception is compatible with an acquaintance model of perception. This article discusses Nicholas Wolterstorff’s (2006) objections to the acquaintance interpretation of Reid. I argue that these objections are inadequate insofar as they do not account for the possibility that Reid offers a ‘state conceptual’ – rather than a ‘state nonconceptual’ – acquaintance theory of perception. I provide textual support for thinking that a state conceptual acquaintance interpretation of Reid is a live possibility, and show how such an interpretation is immune to Wolterstorff’s criticisms.

Bertrand Russell’s writings on neutral monism continue to exercise a profound influence on much work on panpsychism. In fact, many interpret his neutral monism as ultimately constituting, entailing, or strongly suggesting some form of panpsychism. But the relationship between Russell’s theory and contemporary panpsychism is complicated. On one hand, his analysis of matter has a number of features that are congenial to panpsychism. On the other hand, his naturalistic analysis of mind is largely at odds with panpsychism. Though Russell agrees that mental phenomena are likely present to some degree wherever there is biological life, he takes the overall evidence to suggest that mind and experience are neither ubiquitous nor fundamental features of the natural world.