Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description

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Russell's distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description
Russell distinguishes the two by saying that a person acquaints himself with an object when he is in direct cognition to the object, when he or she is aware of the object. Acquaintance comes when a person is aware of something without prior knowledge or interference with another object. Knowledge by acquaintance therefore, is immediate or unmediated knowledge of propositional truth. In contrast, knowledge by description is inferential, indirect, or mediated.
People often misunderstand especially from the traditional account of knowledge with direct acquaintance and having knowledge by acquaintance. Direct acquaintance requires the subject to have unmediated access to the object while the knowledge itself is for the subject to have the belief. Direct acquaintance does not need that belief.
The issues that most people have stem from the distinction between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance. According to Russell, knowledge by acquaintance is the basic knowledge and the one by description is inferential. The foundation of our knowledge relies on acquaintance for its foundation. Bertrand Russell employed dubitability test to determine what a person knows. Sensory experiences and sense data make it possible for someone not to doubt if something exists because of the possibility to hallucinate, dream or due to illusions. A person can know sense data unlike physical objects. In his view, one cannot know physical objects exist by acquaintance. Direct acquaintance can come through introspective experiences, awareness of self, and other internal sensations.
Knowledge by description provides the possibility of knowing physical objects. He says that direct acquaintance relies on two things first through acquaintance for its propositional content. Everything we know must first be constituted by acquaintance although some may outstrip one’s range of immediate knowledge. Russell also believes that one can form beliefs about objects without physically encountering it.
Knowledge by description also depends on the knowledge by acquaintance. This knowledge stems from someone else’s acquaintance. There are three conditions necessary and sufficient for knowledge by acquaintance. These are that a person is in direct contact with the object, the subject has the truth thought, and there is the correspondence relation. It is predicated on something we have known that a physical object causes.
Knowledge by acquaintance has its immediate use in philosophical topics especially in epistemology in issues of metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. This information gives useful insights into the nature of the mind that physical sciences cannot know. It is also useful in supporting property dualism in that our direct knowledge of conscious states justify our belief systems.
We need to understand these types of knowledge because our language uses heavily depend on it. Common or proper names rely on implicit meanings in descriptive knowledge. A proper name that connotes a thought is expressed through a proposition or description. A proper name h...