Shouldn't such denials raise serious doubts regarding acquaintance?
The fact that doubts and disagreements can arise regarding acquaintance or the given should not be too puzzling since not everything about the nature of the given is itself given, and, as Descartes observed long ago, one can easily raise doubts regarding what one can see most clearly and distinctly, at least while one is not attending directly to the appropriate ground or insight.
A thoughtful idea is to hand write to the people closest to you and to print out a copy for people generally regarded as acquaintance.
In End of Term, for example, Nicola Marlow regards her new acquaintance: "She still thought Esther awfully pretty - beautiful, she amended shyly - but she wouldn't really mind if she ended up in another form".
There seems to be some disagreement regarding the nature of acquaintance, e.g., whether it is fundamentally a relation between the self and the target of awareness, or an intrinsic, "built-in" aspect or feature of some mental states; and whether it consists in attention.
Here I present an interview with a clandestine chemist acquaintance whose curiosity regarding forbidden molecules left him locked in a cage.
The authors attributed this discrepancy to Thailand being a "relationship oriented" society in which copying from a friend or acquaintance may not be regarded as plagiarism.
We turn to this question in section 3. First, however, let us briefly discuss contemporary views regarding the nature and objects of acquaintance.
There may also be some disagreement regarding the possible objects or targets of acquaintance.
The acquaintance approach is compatible with adverbialism regarding sense experience; one might be acquainted with experiential states, and with one's experiencing greenly, as opposed to being acquainted with some green object, and with its being green.
