What does it mean to know a person?

Katalin Farkas (http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/internalism-descartes-demon/) has asked the question, and she doesn’t mean know well enough to pick from a line up. She means something quite different.

[The full writeup is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AYPbbJPA_tAQ2Vl5aEiA8mMMp5JTzEt6Sh3Zt5Cq4S8/edit?usp=sharing]

Epistemologists have long distinguished three kinds of knowledge:

• How to or skill (aka, procedural)

• Acquaintance (aka, personal)

• Factual (aka, propositional)

Propositional knowledge, always statable as a declarative sentence, is the kind that has gotten the lion’s share of attention. It is the factual sort. It makes sense to ask of propositions such as these:

“There is life on Mars.”

“The President of the United States is orange.”

“Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.” (Goldbach's conjecture)

“It has never rained in Seattle.”

whether they are true or false. But it doesn’t seem to make sense to say of a skill that it is true or false. The proposition “I can swim” may be true or false, but this is a proposition about me. The proposition makes reference to a skill, surely a kind of knowledge, the ability to swim, and it is not true or false. A skill more closely follows the logic of possession than of legitimacy. Rather, you have it to some degree or you don’t. The skill of being able to swim, though knowledge, is not itself true or false, but the claim to its possession by an individual may well be.

Factual knowledge by itself confers no ability. One can know all and only the factual propositions involved in the skill of swimming because one has read every how-to manual or physics text on the subject, but, never having been in deep water, drown the first time out. The philosophical claim is that procedural knowledge—knowing how—can never be reduced to propositional knowledge—knowing that.

However, this has been disputed. Some thinkers insist all knowledge is reducible to propositional knowledge. (For a motivation, consider the consequences for functionalist accounts of artificial intelligence if this is not the case. Any skill an AI entity has must, according to this view, ultimately be stateable in terms of programing statements. Learning is analyzed in terms of acquiring new libraries of such “know-that” statements. If that’s not sufficient to define skill, then what? A functionalist account of “muscle memory” is that it is nothing different from ordinary memory. Either muscles are not the kinds of things that can store information or, if they are, then there can be no intrinsic difference between a muscle and a brain, nothing about being a “muscle” that qualifies the information it contains.)

In opposition, there are philosophers who think that there are many forms of knowledge, that, fully understood, cannot be analysed in terms of propositional knowledge alone, such as, famously, Gilbert Ryle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Ryle ) and, recently, Farkas who extends the typology of knowledge in interesting directions. Ryle suggested that an ability is not definable in terms of a store of instructions and some executive function in line with those instructions. Farkas is looking at the variety and significance of personal knowledge. Acquaintance knowledge comes in degrees. At its most extreme, we come to something approaching the Biblical sort ( http://scriptoriumdaily.com/knowledge-in-the-biblical-sense/ ).

So the central question of this topic will be: is all knowledge reducible to the propositional sort or is such reduction a dead end and of little use to an understanding of the knowledge most important to beings like us?

Farkas, for instance, suggests that the Biblical notion of “knowing another person” is a marker of significant knowledge far beyond any collection of propositions (and, of course, is not captured in the idea of a skill either)...

[The full writeup is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AYPbbJPA_tAQ2Vl5aEiA8mMMp5JTzEt6Sh3Zt5Cq4S8/edit?usp=sharing]