The phrase "by acquaintance" is a common phrase used in written English.
It is usually used to indicate that someone is known by another person, but not particularly well. For example: "I knew him by acquaintance".
Rosset knew two lawyers by acquaintance.
A first concerns what it takes to have real knowledge of something, knowledge that comes by acquaintance not just by analysis.
If the heart of gaining knowledge by acquaintance is about more than the receipt of sensory data, then presence might never be replicated online.
In other words, to really understand religion you have to experience it, to know it by acquaintance not merely by analysis.
Since philosophical ideas have had an important influence on human endeavors of all kinds, including artistic, political, and economic, students of the humanities should find their understanding deepened by acquaintance with philosophy.
Eight hundred years later, Russell would develop an epistemological theory based on a similar distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, though he would have vigorously denied that the distinction could be used to show that God exists.
Russell therefore made a distinction between what can be known by acquaintance and what can be known only by description i.e., between things whose existence cannot be doubted and things about whose existence, at least theoretically, doubt can be raised.
These essays, by some of the foremost scholars of his life and works, reexamine Russell's famous distinction between "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description," his developing views about our knowledge of physical reality, and his views about our knowledge of logic, mathematics, and other abstract matters.
He said that at one point in his dismal career as a philosophy minor in college he learned that some turn-of-the-century epistemologist asserted that there is a fundamental distinction between what he called knowledge of a thing by acquaintance and knowledge of it by experience.
Attempts have been made to analyze from the viewpoint of logical semantics such philosophical topics as sense-datum theories, knowledge by acquaintance, the paradox of saying and disbelieving propounded by the British philosopher G.E. Moore, and the traditional distinction between statements de dicto ("from saying") and statements de re ("from the thing").
We have already suggested that knowledge by acquaintance should be thought of as knowledge of a truth made possible by acquaintance with the truth maker.
