Introspective knowledge by acquaintance is (roughly) knowledge we acquire just in virtue of being directly aware of our experiences. Differently from most contemporary acquaintance theorists, and similarly to Bertrand Russell, I think that knowledge by acquaintance is a sui generis kind of knowledge: it cannot be reduced to propositional knowledge. In this talk I argue that, although not propositional, knowledge by acquaintance is nonetheless epistemically significant. My argument consists in isolating a mark of epistemic significance, namely information acquisition, and showing that introspective knowledge by acquaintance displays it—it involves acquisition of information about the phenomenology of the introspected experience. Along the way I also argue that knowledge by introspective acquaintance has a special epistemic property, what I call complete and perfect grasp—an epistemic property that, in a sense, is analogous to an epistemic property that has traditionally been attributed to some introspective propositional knowledge, namely, infallibility. I conclude that there are good reasons for thinking that knowledge by acquaintance is epistemically significant.
Activities > Seminar > Introspective knowledge by acquaintance
