Personal Knowledge

In the previous two posts, I have focused on knowledge-how and knowledge-that. There is a third kind of knowledge which might be called knowledge-of. Knowledge-of is also called personal knowledge. It is the knowledge one has of people when one says one knows them. If I know about someone, I merely possess knowledge-that certain facts obtain regarding that person. If I know them, I can predict their actions and understand them.

The obvious question, after yesterday's post, is whether knowledge-how is more or less basic than knowledge-of. I think knowledge-how is the more basic of the two, and thus, barring further kinds of knowledge, the most basic kind of knowledge. Why do I think this?

Let me first raise an objection to my view. One might say that knowledge of others is more basic than even capacities because it is how we gain capacities. We learn how to act by observing others acting, and we learn how to respond to various events by watching others respond. On this account, a capacity would be something more than a possible action. It would have to be an possible action which could also fail to occur, so that I learn that there is more than the obvious thing to do by observing that others respond differently. If we were to define capacities in this manner, I think this account would be right. I also think that it would make knowledge-how unnecessary for knowledge-that and capacities unnecessary for knowledge-how. I will return to this point below.

When we get to know others, we gain capacities. If I know you well, I have certain capacities: the capacity to predict how you will respond to certain claims, foods, or environments. The capacity to understand your train of thought. The capacity to recognize you by how you walk, or how you talk. Many of these capacities are subtle and unconscious. Someone who knows of me only by reading these posts may know a great deal about how I think through things and what my views on things are, but such a reader will not know how I operate in real-time conversations, nor what certain faces I make mean, let alone what I like to eat or the way my thoughts flow when they are not written. These are a particular sort of knowledge-how. Humans generally have the know-how required to get to know each other. What is peculiar about knowledge-of, and what sets it apart from knowledge-how and knowledge-that, is that it is based on knowledge of another's dispositions, another's knowledge-how and -that, and it can rarely if ever be fully communicated. Knowledge-of is peculiar, then, because it manifests the peculiar human sensitivity to others as other selves like ourselves.