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Concept
Knowledge by acquaintance
Summary
In philosophy, a distinction is often made between two different kinds of knowledge: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Whereas knowledge by description is something like ordinary propositional knowledge (e.g. "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 some object that the person is perceiving.
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 and ειδεναι), Latin (noscere and scire), German (kennen and wissen), and French (connaître and 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.
In a similar fashion, in 1868 Hermann von Helmholtz clearly distinguished between das Kennen, the knowledge that consisted of "mere familiarity with phenomena", 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".
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.
Official source
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