Research

Doctoral Thesis: 

Knowledge by Acquaintance: An Explication and Defence 

Abstract: Recently, there has been a renaissance of study on knowledge by acquaintance. One reason for this is that many writers believe acquaintance holds the key to understanding consciousness and our conscious experience of the world  For this reason, research on acquaintance has been primarily focused on perception and self-knowledge. While these questions are undoubtedly important, I believe being overly focused on these issues has prevented a defensible theory of knowledge by acquaintance from being developed. In particular, two questions have largely been ignored in the literature. First, what kind of knowledge is knowledge by acquaintance? If knowledge by acquaintance is supposed to give us special epistemic access to its objects, what are the central epistemic features of it and how do they differ from other kinds of knowledge? Second, can we have knowledge by acquaintance beyond cases of perception and self-knowledge, and if so how?

In my dissertation, I answer both of these questions. In response to the first question, I argue that knowledge by acquaintance is a form of non-propositional discriminatory knowledge. Roughly, discriminatory knowledge is the exercise of a discriminatory capacity to single out a particular object from other objects of its kind. It is non-propositional because the object of the mental act of discriminating is not a proposition or truth. It is important that we understand knowledge by acquaintance in terms of discriminatory knowledge because it allows us to move beyond perceptual knowledge and self-knowledge. In my dissertation, I show how this is possible by showing that we can be acquainted with the natural numbers. This provides an answer to our second question. There is, in principle, no reason why acquaintance should only exist in sensory perception, provided we understand it in terms of discriminatory knowledge. The upshot of this is that my account of knowledge by acquaintance has a breadth and unity not often found in the acquaintance literature. 

Papers

A paper on acquaintance and numbers (titled and abstract removed during review)

Acquaintance, Knowledge and Luck
Abstract: Acquaintance has undergone a recent resurgence of interest in the philosophy of mind and perception. What are the epistemic properties of this mental relation of acquaintance? Some theorists argue that acquaintance is a special source of (propositional) knowledge, while others argue that it is a special kind of knowledge that is distinct from propositional knowledge. In this paper, I examine the reasons for this latter view. I consider how the standard analysis of propositional knowledge can be transposed to non-propositional knowledge-by-acquaintance. I focus on anti-luck conditions for perceptual knowledge.

Cognitively Homeless Russell
Abstract: Russell is often thought to have held some form of privileged access thesis about acquaintance. If one has acquaintance with an object O, then one has infallible knowledge of O. I show that this is a mistake. In a much-neglected passage, Russell presents an early version of Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument. I compare the two arguments and show that far from accepting any version of the privileged access thesis, Russell is actually in no way committed to knowledge by acquaintance being luminous.

Acquaintance and Memory
An examination of whether there can be memory-based acquaintance that gives us knowledge of past objects

Acquaintance and Self-Knowledge
A discussion of whether we can have acquaintance via introspection and how that differs from acquaintance in perception.