hopper schreef: 30 mar 2020, 13:10
Daarmee bedoel ik verifieerbaar in mijzelf, niet in de waargenomen wereld.
M.i. kan ieder mens voor zich die waarheid ontdekken in zichzelf.
Oude uitspraken zijn daarbij een hulpmiddel. Zoals het ANWB bord Maastricht een hulpmiddel is om in Maastricht te komen.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/know ... indescrip/
Knowledge by Acquaintance vs. Description
1. The Distinction
To get clear on the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, let us briefly examine how its originator, Bertrand Russell, characterized it (see Russell 1910–11 and 1912: Ch. 5). First, what is meant by “acquaintance” and “description”?
We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge of truths. (Russell 1912: 78)
What distinguishes acquaintance is, minimally, the following two closely related features. First, it is a nonjudgmental and nonconceptual form of awareness. Judgments, thoughts and concepts are essentially intentional or representational in nature, i.e., they are about or represent other things. Acquaintance with something does not consist in forming any judgment or thought about it, or in having any concept or representation of it.
Second, it is a form of awareness constituting a real, genuine relation, a relation that cannot obtain without its relata (the things or items related). One cannot be acquainted with something that does not exist. Acquaintance is thus like the relation of kicking or throwing, for one cannot kick or throw without there being something that is kicked or thrown—something that is the object of the kicking or throwing.
Of course, these are not forms of awareness!) In contrast, judgments and concepts may represent or be about things that don’t exist. Philosophers sometimes refer to this second feature by saying that acquaintance is “infallible”. However, this term is most often used to refer to a property of beliefs: roughly, a belief is infallible if it is immune to error or is guaranteed to be true. Given the first feature above, being acquainted with something is not to be understood in terms of having a belief or judgment about it, not even an infallible one.
Traditionally, acquaintance theorists have taken the most promising candidates for entities with which we can be acquainted to be conscious states of mind (e.g., an experience of pain, a sensation of red) and their properties (e.g., painfulness, redness). Russell and many other acquaintance theorists also take themselves to be acquainted with facts, i.e., with something’s having some property—at least mental facts (e.g., my being in pain, my desiring food, my experiencing red).
What about the possibility of acquaintance with ourselves? Can an individual be directly acquainted with him or herself? Russell takes the question of whether we are ever acquainted with the self to be a difficult one. He says that acquaintance with the self is “hard to disentangle from other things,” but tentatively concludes that “it is probable, though not certain, that we have acquaintance with Self” (1912: 78–81.) However, he later denies that we have acquaintance with the self (see Russell 1914: part III). In a recent paper, Duncan (2015) uses the method of doubt, or something very much like it, to argue that we are acquainted with ourselves.
This seems to be a natural and relatively straightforward way of drawing the distinction. However, there may seem to be a problem with this way of drawing the distinction, at least as an interpretation of Russell, for he denies that knowledge by acquaintance is knowledge of truths:
Knowledge of things, when it is of the kind we call knowledge by acquaintance, is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths, and logically independent of knowledge of truths,
though it would be rash to assume that human beings ever, in fact, have acquaintance with things without at the same time knowing some truth about them. (Russell 1912: 72)
