What Acquaintance Teaches

Grzankowski, Alex; Tye, Michael

doi:10.1093/oso/9780198803461.003.0004

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…McGinn (2008), Pitt (forthcoming), Strawson (2017), Tye (2009), and Grzankowski and Tye (2019). For criticism of this view, see Crane (2012) and Farkas (2019).…”

Section: Duncan -9 Of 19mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…26 26 This includes Alston (1986), Campbell (2014, p. 13–14), Coleman (2019), Conee (1994), Duncan (2020, forthcoming), McGinn (2008), Pitt (forthcoming), Strawson (2017), Tye (2009), and Grzankowski and Tye (2019). For criticism of this view, see Crane (2012) and Farkas (2019).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…29 29 Specifically, Frank Jackson's (1982) knowledge argument. Philosophers who appeal to acquaintance to resist this argument include Balog (2012), Bigelow and Pargetter (1990, 2006), Churchland (1985, 1989), Conee (1994), Grzankowski and Tye (2019), Howell (2013), McGinn (2008, fn. 5), and Tye (2009).…”

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Acquaintance

Duncan

2021

Philosophy Compass

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To be acquainted with something (in the philosophical sense of "acquainted" discussed here) is to be directly aware of it. The idea that we are acquainted with certain things we experience has been discussed throughout the history of Western Philosophy, but in the early 20th century it gained especially focused attention among analytic philosophers who drew their inspiration from Bertrand Russell's work on acquaintance. Since then, many philosophers-particularly those working on self-knowledge or perception-have used the notion of acquaintance to explain various facts about human experience and knowledge. In this paper, I offer an overview of this work, with particular focus on the resurgent literature on acquaintance in contemporary analytic philosophy. After more fully explaining what acquaintance is (or is supposed to be), I describe some reasons for thinking that we are indeed acquainted with certain things we experience, and then I survey some of the facts about experience and knowledge that acquaintance may help explain. 1 | INTRODUCTION This paper is about acquaintance-an especially direct mental relation that we (allegedly) bear to certain things we experience, such as colors, smells, tastes, pains, and itches. This philosophical notion has received renewed interest and use of late, but it has also invited misunderstanding and skepticism. My aim in this paper is to dispel some of that misunderstanding and, hopefully, some of the skepticism too. Most contemporary philosophers who appeal to acquaintance draw their inspiration from Bertrand Russell (1911, 1912), who characterizes acquaintance as direct awareness. This differs from the ordinary sense of "acquaintance," as in "Hector and Paula are acquaintances" (or related knowledge attributions, such as "Hector knows Paula"). For one may be acquainted with something in that sense without being directly aware of it.

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“…McGinn (2008), Pitt (forthcoming), Strawson (2017), Tye (2009), and Grzankowski and Tye (2019). For criticism of this view, see Crane (2012) and Farkas (2019).…”

Section: Duncan -9 Of 19mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acquaintance

Duncan

2021

Philosophy Compass

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“…Propositionalism about Mary's elusive knowledge What Mary loses upon her return to her black and white room is justification for a unique propositional attitude she acquired through acquaintance Grzankowski and Tye (2019) suggest that Mary acquires a new belief which has as its content a demonstrative proposition, such as <this is what redness is like> or <this is red> where "this" picks out the quality Mary is acquainted with (cf. Howell, 2013, ch.…”

Section: Elusive Knowledge Gained Through Acquaintancementioning

confidence: 99%

Acquaintance, knowledge, and value

Atiq

2021

Synthese

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Taking perceptual experience to consist in a relation of acquaintance with the sensible qualities, I argue that the state of being acquainted with a sensible quality is intrinsically a form of knowledge, and not merely a means to more familiar kinds of knowledge, such as propositional or dispositional knowledge. We should accept the epistemic claim for its explanatory power and theoretical usefulness. That acquaintance is knowledge best explains the intuitive epistemic appeal of 'Edenic' counterfactuals involving unmediated perceptual contact with reality (cf. Chalmers, in: Gendler, Hawthorne (eds) Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press, 2006). It explains the elusiveness of knowledge gained through new acquaintances. It coheres with the knowledge-like functional role of acquaintance in the special context of evaluative beliefs and evaluative reasoning, where the objects of acquaintance serve as evidence and inferential basis. And, finally, taking acquaintance to be knowledge is theoretically fruitful: it helps vindicate claims about the relationship between knowledge and concern for others we already find intuitive or outright accept. After developing a novel case for the epistemic claim, I respond to two familiar objections against it: namely, (1) that there are no pre-propositional, pre-conceptual cases of perceptual experience that remain epistemically relevant (Sellars in Empiricism and the philosophy of mind, Routledge, 1968, McDowell, in: Lindgard (ed) John McDowell: Experience, norm, and nature, Blackwell, 2008); and (2) that the category of knowledge appears gerrymandered once we add 'object' knowledge to the epistemological mix (Farkas, in: Knowles, Raleigh (eds), Acquaintance: new essays, Oxford University Press, 2019).

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“…16 Some philosophers respond by arguing that Mary doesn't know all the physical facts about color experience inside her black-and-white room (e.g., Alter, 1998;Moran, n.d.). Others attempt to make sense of Mary's apparent discovery while avoiding the anti-physicalist conclusion by arguing that she only gains new know-how (e.g., Lewis, 1988Lewis, /2004; that she gains new knowledge-that by coming to know a previously known physical fact under a new concept (e.g., Horgan, 1984); that she comes to bear a new (distinctive) relation of truth-apt knowledge to a physical fact of which she already had (ordinary) knowledge-that (Pelczar, 2005); that she gains new knowledge by acquaintance of a physical property (e.g., Conee, 1994;Tye, 2009); or that she comes to base her knowledge-that of a previously known physical fact on her knowledge by acquaintance of a physical property (Grzankowski and Tye, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The moral parody argument against panpsychism

Blaesi

2021

Philos Stud

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I exploit parallel considerations in the philosophy of mind and metaethics to argue that the reasoning employed in an important argument for panpsychism overgeneralizes to support an analogous position in metaethics: panmoralism. Next, I raise a number of problems for panmoralism and thereby build a case for taking the metaethical parallel to be a reductio ad absurdum of the argument for panpsychism. Finally, I contrast panmoralism with a position recently defended by Einar Duenger Bohn and argue that the two suffer from similar problems. I conclude by drawing some general lessons for panpsychism.This is a preprint of an article published in Philosophical Studies.

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What Acquaintance Teaches

Cited by 9 publications

References 49 publications

Acquaintance

Acquaintance

Acquaintance, knowledge, and value

The moral parody argument against panpsychism

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