Direct Acquaintance? Do We Really

¶ … Direct Acquaintance?

Do We Really Know Anything by Direct Acquaintance?

How do we know what we know? Can we trust our very limited senses to provide us a sense of true knowledge of the external world around us? These are serious questions that have seemed to plague mankind for centuries. The debate rages on even today. Essentially, it is hard to say that we can know anything through experience, or acquaintance of it. With our limited sensory abilities, what we experience of any particular object or phenomenon may be distorted from what the object really is. Thus, we can gain some insight from being acquainted with any given object or phenomenon, but in order to truly understand that object in correlation with the rest of what we know, we rely more on description knowledge to truly know what we know. As such, we can say that knowledge by acquaintance is not enough to compile a true understanding of the world and the complex relationships within it.

Knowledge by acquaintance is one of the two types of understanding that we as humans can grasp as expressed by Bertrand. Essentially, this is a knowledge that we get directly from experience. It occurs when we, as thinkers, are overtly aware of the object in question. We witness some sort of stimulus or phenomenon and then begin to gather knowledge from the experience we had with that object or phenomenon in question. There are so many examples of this, as most of what we learn comes through some sort of experience. For example, we know the color red because we have seen it. We know what a table is because we have used it, time and time again. It is in our immediate presence, and thus we have a consciousness of it that comes from our experience of it. Through the objects acquaintance, we gain a sense of knowledge of what it is and its relevance in comparison to everything else we have come into acquaintance with. This type of knowledge requires very little prior knowledge, because it is based on our sensory perception of the object directly as we experience it. There is no need to have knowledge of some greater truth or phenomenon to better understand that the color red is red, and not green. It simply is what it is, and nothing else. This type of knowledge is in direct contrast to knowledge by description, where we need some sort of further explanation to really grasp the concept of the knowledge or phenomenon at hand. A greater depth of knowledge thus comes from knowledge by description, since we must build on our initial sensory knowledge. Such knowledge then allows us to make assumptions and conclusions based on relationships and characteristics that we can build upon from our initial sensory data as acquired through acquaintance.