The Normative Profile of Knowledge by Acquaintance

Many philosophers have found it plausible that sense experience affords a species of nonpropositional awareness and knowledge, what Russell termed “knowledge by acquaintance.” At the same time, a prominent strand in epistemology maintains that knowledge has a distinctive normative profile: it is embedded in justificatory relations, serves as a standard of success for underlying attitudes, grounds regulative norms, and qualifies as a cognitive achievement. Yet it remains unclear how a nonpropositional state of acquaintance, formed without evidential basis and beyond rational control, could fit within this normative structure. I trace the connections between different formulations of what I call “the normativity objection” to Russell’s view and offer a unified response. The objection, I argue, rests on an overly passive conception of acquaintance. Once acquaintance is seen as partly constituted by attention—a subject-level, reasons-responsive activity—it can satisfy knowledge’s normative role by serving as the success condition of a norm-governed performance. This not only strengthens the Russellian program but also reveals a striking convergence between the structure of consciousness and the structure of epistemic normativity.