Matthew A. Benton (Seattle Pacific University), "The Epistemology of Interpersonal Relations"

Forthcoming, Noûs

By Matt Benton

What is it to know someone? Philosophers who work in epistemology, or philosophy of mind, or social philosophy, rarely examine this question. Why not? Perhaps because it quickly leads to some puzzling terrain.

Nowadays, of course, you can know a lot about someone by way of social media or other sorts of online presence, and can "friend" them and interact with them through such online venues. So the relevant concepts have been expanded (or obscured) in just the last ten to fifteen years! But perhaps we can grope our way to some clarity, even if not yet full-fledged answers.

When you know someone else (in the personal or relational sense), and you (or someone else) claims such "knowledge," this can convey several different notions of epistemic interest. It often can mean that you know much about them: maybe you know some key facts like their name or where they are from; what they do or what roles they have professionally or socially (among others); or perhaps that they share certain values with you. Such facts can typically be construed as propositions that are true of them, which are then available to be expressed using language, shareable through testimony. Sometimes, however, we can know a lot about someone without knowing them personally or ever meeting them. 

On many occasions, claiming you know someone carries with it the idea that you can identify them by way of some qualitative knowledge about them: you might know what they look like, or how they behave, their mannerisms, or some aspects of their personality. This sort of knowledge requires some experiential component: you normally need direct perceptual contact with them, or at least have studied them through photos or videos of them. Yet this qualitative knowledge of what-they-are-like, because it resists being reduced to some propositional claim, also defies easy communication by testimony. It even seems ineligible to be known through testimony: normally, we'd deny that you can come to know much (if any) about what someone is like in those qualitative senses, just by having someone describe them to you. I don't really acquire knowledge of what someone looks like just by your telling me what they look like; this is partly why legal contexts distinguish eye-witnesses from hearsay.

So we can know a lot about others without knowing them personally. But that doesn't suffice for knowing them personally. What seems to matter is meeting, or interacting in certain ways, where this involves a kind of two-way relating to each other. What exactly might that involve? Hmm. (My view requires a sort of second-personal treatment, as an I to a you.) 

Yet also, we can plausibly come to know someone personally even if we do not learn very much about them propositionally, or qualitatively. So much knowledge about someone isn't necessary nor sufficient. For example, someone whom we are getting to know might lie to us, including about themselves; or they might disguise qualitative features of themselves (wearing a mask, or using a pseudonym, etc.). Perhaps you don't then know them well, but surely we'd allow that, often enough, you still know them personally. For if falsity or artifice blocked us from knowing others personally, we'd probably count as knowing no one (perhaps not even ourselves! – though that's a different topic).

Perhaps knowing another in this sense merely flags that one has begun or is in a certain sort of relationship (as Kati Farkas suggests elsewhere). And undoubtedly such interpersonal knowledge ascriptions typically do refer, in part, to the relationship itself. But I think this cannot be the whole story. For on the one hand, we also say we do not know others (personally) any longer once they've died, where it remains true that we had in the past had a relationship with them. Yet we usually retain our propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone even when they've died or have otherwise severed the relationship. 

And on the other hand, when we attribute interpersonal knowledge, we tend to signal a range of interconnected things that we know or understand about them, particularly what we might know through the interpersonal relationship we've had with them. Even more, people can often assess how well we know others purely by whether we know certain facts or qualities about them, particularly when being in relationship enables them to reveal such to us. So the second-personal interactions shape what we know about them – and what they know about us – and further, such interactions shape who it is that is known. Thus there remain rich connections to uncover about exactly what the complex contents of such knowledge are, apart from the subject themself whom one knows. 

I argue for an (incomplete) account of these ideas, drawing on recent work in contemporary epistemology and mind. And I trace out their implications for issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and mental contents for those whom we interpersonally know. (I also develop some of these ideas applied in epistemology of religion elsewhere, here.)