KNOWLEDGE BY ACQUAINTANCE AND DESCRIPTION
According to Russell one can distinguish the two kinds of knowledge in terms of their respective objects. One has knowledge by acquaintance of things, and one has knowledge by description of propositions. Russell also seemed to believe that one can have knowledge by acquaintance of properties and facts. Knowledge by acquaintance is neither true nor false and knowledge by description is either true or false. According to Russell, all knowledge of truths ultimately rests on knowledge by acquaintance. Although I can know one truth by inferring it from something else I know, not everything I know can be inferred in this way. We can avoid a regress of knowledge by holding that at least some truths are known as a result of acquaintance with those aspects of the world that make the corresponding propositions true.
When one knows a particular shade of colour by acquaintance, for example, the colour is directly and immediately 'before' one's consciousness. There is nothing 'between' the colour and oneself. By contrast, one might know truths about Gandhi but one's access to such truths is only through inference from other things one knows about the contents of history books and the like. There is spatio-temporal gap between us and Gandhi. The contents of my visual field, the sensory character of, the capacity to touch, smell, hear and taste sensations, my thoughts and emotions are all held by most radical empiricists to be items with which I can be directly acquainted. In addition, one might hold that the mind is capable of directly encountering such abstract entities as numbers and universals. The radical empiricists typically denied that one can be directly acquainted with physical objects, items in the past or items in the future. The test of whether or not one can know without inference that something exists is described in terms of the conceivability of error. On this view, one sign that I cannot be directly acquainted with the physical table before me now is that my evidence for believing that the table exists does not logically guarantee its existence. My evidence is said to consist of what I know about my sensations, knowledge that would be no different were I dreaming or hallucinating the table's existence. On the other hand, 1 am directly acquainted with my severe pain because the justification I now have for believing that I have this pain precludes the possibility of my being wrong I cannot hallucinate the existence of severe pain. To think that this pain with which I am acquainted is toothache is to apply the concept toothache to the pain with which I am acquainted. I can correctly or incorrectly categorize something with which 1 am acquainted, but the prior act of my being acquainted with the thing does not involve the possibility of error, because acquaintance does not by itself involve an attempt to categorize the thing in question.
According to Russell, all knowledge by description ultimately depends upon knowledge by acquaintance. But if knowledge by acquaintance does not involve the possibility of error because it does not have as its object something that can be true or false, how can it give us first truths? How can it give us premises (which by their very nature must be true or false) from which to infer other truths? Either knowledge by acquaintance does not involve the application of concepts and cannot therefore give premises for inference, or it does involve the application of concepts and cannot be distinguished from knowledge by description.
There are no facts that are independent of conceptual frameworks, some philosophers argue. The world is not divided into things, their properties and relations, indeed the only distinctions that exist are distinctions that we make out of the world with our concepts and categories. Referring to a fact is just another way of talking about a proposition's being true. To say that the world contains the fact, grass being green, is just another way of saying that it is true that grass is green. Only a structured reality could make propositions true and only acquaintance with such stricture would be a plausible candidate for the source of foundational knowledge. Many contemporary philosophers argue that the very nature of justification precludes the possibility of having justification for believing empirical propositions that eliminates the possibility of error.
(Courtesy: History of Western Philosophy)
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