Acquaintance Is Epistemically Significant

Abstract This chapter argues that acquaintance has further epistemic significance beyond what the author attributed to it in previous chapters. The author argues that acquaintance not only has epistemic significance in itself, simply in virtue of being knowledge, but also in virtue of justifying beliefs—both immediately and inferentially. He then uses these results to defend various forms of epistemic foundationalism. Ultimately, the author argues that acquaintance is the foundation for all empirical knowledge. That is, he argues that all knowledge that depends for its justification on perceptual or introspective experience depends on acquaintance for its justification. He considers whether some of these results can be gotten without acquaintance—that is, by appealing to experience in more neutral terms, without positing an acquaintance relation. He argues that they cannot—that acquaintance plays a central, ineliminable role in the epistemology of experience.