Two Verbs for Knowing

Why no description, however complete, delivers the thing it describes

Several languages split the English verb "to know" into two separate words, and the split isn't an accident of vocabulary. German has kennen (to be acquainted with a person, place, or thing) and wissen (to know a fact); French has connaître and savoir. In each case, one verb is for knowing a fact about something, and the other is for having actually met it — been in its presence, had direct contact with it.

English collapses both into one word, which may be part of why the distinction is so easy to lose track of. But it was named clearly by the philosopher John Grote in 1865, then developed by Bertrand Russell in a short 1910 paper that became one of the founding texts of analytic philosophy. Russell called the two kinds knowledge by description — knowing facts about something, however many, however complete — and knowledge by acquaintance — direct, unmediated awareness of the thing itself.

Two traditions, the same wall

The French philosopher Henri Bergson, writing in 1903, drew functionally the same distinction using different terms. He called the two modes analysis and intuition. Analysis means approaching an object from outside, translating it into symbols, circling it from as many angles as you like — exactly what description does. Intuition means entering into the object itself, coinciding with what's unique about it — acquaintance, under another name.

Bergson illustrated the limit of analysis by imagining a poem translated into every language available: each translation is a legitimate, useful vantage point, and no accumulation of them, however skillful, ever reconstitutes the poem's untranslatable interior.

What makes this worth taking seriously is that Bergson, working in continental philosophy in France, and Russell, working in analytic philosophy in England, arrived at structurally the same split within a few years of each other, using almost none of the same vocabulary, largely unaware of each other's work. Two incompatible traditions independently hit the same wall.

What Mary didn't know

The clearest modern attempt to make the distinction testable is a thought experiment the philosopher Frank Jackson published in 1982, now usually called Mary's Room. Mary is a brilliant scientist who has spent her entire life inside a room with no color in it — everything she sees, including her own skin, is black, white, and grey. Working through black-and-white monitors and textbooks, she nonetheless masters every physical fact there is to know about color and color vision: the full physics of light, the complete neuroscience of the retina and visual cortex, every causal step from a photon to a person saying the word "red." Her description is, by any reasonable standard, complete.

Then she's let out of the room and sees a ripe tomato for the first time. Does Mary learn something new?

Most people's immediate intuition is yes. And if she does, a complete physical description of color vision, however exhaustive, left something out: what seeing red is actually like, from the inside.

This isn't settled. David Lewis and Laurence Nemirow argued Mary doesn't gain a new fact, only a new ability — to recognize and imagine red — a skill rather than knowledge. Frank Jackson himself later changed his mind and rejected his own famous argument. But notice what even the strongest rebuttal concedes: it denies Mary learns a new fact. It doesn't deny she leaves the room with something her exhaustive black-and-white textbooks couldn't put there. The dispute is almost entirely about what to call what she gains — a fact, or a skill — not about whether she gains anything at all.

The rollercoaster problem

Consider watching someone ride a rollercoaster versus riding it yourself. Watching, however closely — hearing them yell, seeing their body thrown sideways, however many camera angles — is knowledge by description: an accumulation of external facts about what's happening to another body. Riding it is knowledge by acquaintance: direct, first-person contact with the drop, unmediated by any report.

No number of additional camera angles closes that gap, for the same structural reason no number of physics textbooks delivers the redness of red to Mary, and no number of translations delivers a poem's untranslatable interior. Words, like camera angles, are built for description. They can gesture at the edge of acquaintance — describe its shape, its intensity — but they can't cross into it, because crossing isn't a matter of adding more or better words. It's a different kind of contact altogether, the kind only the person occupying that one particular point of view can ever have.

What this sets up

No representation, however complete, transmits acquaintance. A perfect description can circle a thing from every available angle and still not be the thing, or the having of it. That's not a failure of any particular writer or argument. It's what description structurally is, as opposed to what acquaintance is.

That distinction explains something that looks, at first, entirely unrelated: why spirituality pulls at people with real force, and why so much of what gets said in its name feels thin the moment it's put into words. That's next.

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This is the fourth in a series adapted from The Cost of Knowing. Next: why intuition is magnetic, and why speaking it out loud is what makes it sound fussy.