Bertrand Russell makes a distinction between two different kinds of knowledge: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA-->. Whereas knowledge by description is something like ordinary propositional knowledge (I. E. "I know that snow is white"), knowledge by acquaintance is familiarity with a person, place, or thing, typically obtained through perceptual experience (e.g. "I know Sam", "I know the city of Bogotá", or "I know Russell's Problems of Philosophy"). According to Bertrand Russell's classic account of acquaintance knowledge, acquaintance is a direct causal interaction between a person and an object of experience.

Pre-Russellian accounts

Grote

In 1865, philosopher John Grote distinguished between what he described as "knowledge of acquaintance" and "knowledge-about". Grote noted that these distinctions were made in many languages. He cited Greek (γνωναι, ειδεναι), Latin (noscere, scire), German (kennen, wissen), and French (connaître, savoir) as examples.

Grote's "knowledge of acquaintance" is far better known today as "knowledge by acquaintance", following Russell's decision to change the preposition in a paper that he read to the Aristotelian Society on 6 March 1911.

Helmholtz

In a similar fashion, in 1868 Hermann von Helmholtz had distinguished clearly between das Kennen, the knowledge that consisted of "mere familiarity with phenomena", translated as "cognition" by Frances A. Welby, and das Wissen, "the knowledge of [phenomena] which can be communicated by speech". Stressing that the Kennen sort of knowledge could not "compete with" the Wissen sort of knowledge, Helmholtz argued that, despite the fact that it might be of "the highest possible degree of precision and certainty", the Kennen kind of knowledge can not be expressed in words, "even to ourselves".

James

In 1890, William James, agreeing there were two fundamental kinds of knowledge, and adopting Grote's terminology, further developed the distinctions made by Grote and Helmholtz:

::I am acquainted with many people and things, which I know very little about, except their presence in the places where I have met them. I know the color blue when I see it, and the flavour of a pear when I taste it; I know an inch when I move my finger through it; a second of time, when I feel it pass; an effort of attention when I make it; a difference between two things when I notice it; but about the inner nature of these facts or what makes them what they are, I can say nothing at all. I cannot impart acquaintance with them to any one who has not already made it himself I cannot describe them, make a blind man guess what blue is like, define to a child a syllogism, or tell a philosopher in just what respect distance is just what it is, and differs from other forms of relation. At most, I can say to my friends, Go to certain places and act in certain ways, and these objects will probably come. (1890, p.221)

Bertrand Russell

"On Denoting"

The distinction in its present form was first proposed by British philosopher Bertrand Russell in his famous 1905 paper, "On Denoting". According to Russell, knowledge by acquaintance is obtained exclusively through experience, and results from a direct causal interaction between a person and an object that the person is perceiving. In accordance with Russell's views on perception, sense-data from that object are the only things that people can ever become acquainted with; they can never truly be acquainted with the physical object itself. A person can also be acquainted with his own sense of self (cogito ergo sum) and his thoughts and ideas. However, other people could not become acquainted with another person's mind, for example. They have no way of directly interacting with it, since a mind is an internal object. They can only perceive that a mind could exist by observing that person's behaviour.

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 the frequency of the light reflected off the snow causes the human eye, and by extension, the human mind, to perceive snow to be 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. John is fully justified in his belief not if he merely makes an inference regarding his pain ("I must be in pain because my arm is bleeding"), but only if he 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 by 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 knows it only 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 a 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.

The Problems of Philosophy

The distinction between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance is developed much further in Russell's 1912 book, The Problems of Philosophy.

Russell referred to acquaintance as "the given". He theorized that certain familiarities develop from an individual's experience with various primary impressions (sensory or abstract) that are so much a part of awareness itself that the individual possesses knowledge of these familiar features without accessing memories by the cognitive process of remembering. Russell believes that acquaintance is necessary in order for us to form any proposition—that any belief we form must be composed entirely of experiential components with which we have acquaintance. Per Russell, all foundational knowledge is by acquaintance, and all non-foundational (inferential) knowledge is developed from acquaintance relations. and Matthew Benton's "Epistemology Personalized" and "The Epistemology of Interpersonal Relations".

See also

References

Bibliography

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