Talk:Knowledge by acquaintance

There is a revival of the aquaintance notion occuring in some contemporary work on perception. Direct realists, or "disjunctivists" like John Campbell at UC Berkeley are using the aquaintance relation minus sense-datum. I'd make the addition myself but I'm not currently in a position to get my hands on the relevant literature. the levarage of a close one can also be desribed as quatined —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.219.8.243 (talk) 10:00, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

The same article...
This article and knowledge by description are practically the same article. I would suggest a merge, or to expand both articles. CKnapp (talk) 01:30, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Merge they is no need for two stubs. --Inayity (talk) 16:33, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Smart comment, CKnapp!
Done! Maurice Carbonaro (talk) 09:36, 23 August 2012 (UTC) This is a response to the question of merging Knowledge by acquaintance with Knowledge by description. I haven't seen the articles mentioned about each. What I know (by acquaintance!) is the two are potentially very different. KbyA implies direct experience with the subject or event (obviously open to interpretation) and KbyD can be attributes, properties or even feelings derived from an outside second-hand source. Whereas KbyA can't even be fully transferred to another person by verbal description, the other can be relayed with many precise words. Also, there's the matter of the experience of one person never being identical to that of another (of the same event for instance) because of the acquired filters of experience and conclusions borne of those experiences held by the individual. The 'event' is literally different for each perspective who perceives it. Now if the Knower by Acquaintance tries to convey the experience to another it is KbyD. Which just goes to show that most knowledge is rarely if ever absolute but highly subjective and a guidepost for another. In other words, have your own experiences, live your own life and don't try to make knowledge universal or the same for everyone else! Let it be diverse, which is what makes this place (physical Earth and existence) interesting and creative. (Now, I seemingly rambled off the subject but not really. This is where it leads to.)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Allower of good (talk • contribs) 06:08, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Changed class
I changed the class from Start to C. I think it has quite a fair amount of information, and its problems mostly consist of citations and perhaps improving clarity. The Crumpled Pamphlet (talk) 16:10, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

This article is essentially motivated reasoning. It should be removed or corrected and merged elsewhere.
The supposed "Pre-Russellian" accounts are being related to Russell's later idea of "knowledge by acquaintance" based on nothing more than use of the same word. This is especially the case with the James quote. James is talking about the ultimate subjectivity of individual experiences and that simply describing what something tastes like isn't the same as tasting it. This is trivially true. Other Pragmatists make this point also, that individual experiences are ultimately individual, in service of the point that it isn't necessary that subjective experiences be exactly the same for agreement to be possible; all that is necessary is that they are similar enough and we can communicate about them well enough to take meaningful actions toward a desired end. The historical context is that he was arguing with both idealists and reductive empiricists who took reality to be ideas and ideas to be objective. This isn't the case and also is not necessary.

In fact, James elsewhere specifically denies the idea of phenomenal consciousness or anything like what we call "qualia."

What Russell is talking about is using some notion of acquaintance as necessary with regard to knowledge of concepts and propositions. This is completely different. And even if he happened to be inspired by the likes of Helmholtz and James, he is making a serious leap in attempting to apply it the way he does in On Denoting. In fact, his sense of "acquaintance" is exactly what James and other Pragmatists intended to undermine in their larger point regarding subjective experiences.

So, James (at the very least just him) is being coopted in this article, to make it seem that there was some kind of mounting tradition of discovery or positing "knowledge by acquaintance" that culminated in Russell's famous paper. This is ridiculous and is motivated reasoning; gathering sources based on the used of a common word: acquaintance.

The author(s) placing James and Russell adjacent to each other like this have obviously never read the exchanges between the two of them on issues of knowledge and truth: they vehemently disagreed these topics, and they did not share an epistemological outlook.

If this article is to be kept, it should be a tab in an article on Russell himself, or it should be an article on the content of On Denoting. Leave Grote, Helmholtz, and especially James, out of it. Schillerian (talk) 23:19, 8 October 2023 (UTC)