Knowledge‐by‐Acquaintance First

Bertrand Russell's epistemology had the interesting structural feature that it made propositional knowledge (“S knows that p ”) asymmetrically dependent upon what Russell called knowledge by acquaintance . On this view, a subject lacking any knowledge by acquaintance would be unable to know that p for any p . This is something that virtually nobody has defended since Russell, and in this paper I initiate a sympathetic reconsideration.