Knowledge by acquaintance
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The expressions Knowledge by acquaintance and Knowledge by description were introduced in current philosophy by Bertrand Russell to designate two fundamentally different types of knowledge.
To be fully justified in believing a proposition to be true one must be acquainted, not only with the fact that supposedly makes the proposition true, but with the relation of correspondence that holds between the proposition and the fact. In other words, justified true belief can only occur if I know that a proposition (e.g. "Snow is white") is true in virtue of a fact (e.g. that snow is indeed white). By way of example, John is justified in believing that he is in pain if he is directly and immediately acquainted with his pain. Not if John makes an inference regarding his pain ("I must be in pain because my arm is bleeding"), but feels it as an immediate sensation ("My arm hurts!"). This direct contact with the fact and the knowledge that this fact makes a proposition true is what is meant with knowledge by acquaintance.
On the contrary, when one is not directly and immediately acquainted with a fact, such as Julius Caesar's assassination, we speak of knowledge by description. When one is not directly in contact with the fact, but only knows it indirectly by means of a description, one arguably is not entirely justified in holding a proposition true (such as e.g. "Caesar was killed by Brutus").
The acquaintance theorist can argue that one has noninferentially justified belief "that P" only when one has the thought "that P" and one is acquainted with both the fact that P is the case, the thought "that P", and the relation of correspondence holding between the thought "that P" and the fact that P is the case. So I must not only know the proposition P, and the fact that P is the case, but also know that the fact that P is the case is what makes proposition P true.
See also
External link
- A page at Stanford about knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-acquaindescrip/)