Different Senses of Word "Know", by John Hospers

Different Senses of Word "Know", by John Hospers

According to John Hospers, the word 'know' is slippery. It is not always used in the same way. Here are some of it's principal uses :

1. Sometimes when we talk about knowing, we are referring to 'acquaintance' of some kind. For example, "Do you know Richard Smith?" Means approximately the same as "Are you acquainted with Richard Smith?" (Have you met him? etc.). You might know him , in the sense of acquaintance,  without knowing much about him; and you know a great deal about someone but not know him because you have never met him. Or we might ask, "Do you know that quaint old country lane seven miles west of town?" And here, though we can hardly speak of knowing it in quite the same way (we haven't been introduced), we are still talking about acquaintance: Have you been there? Have you seen it by yourself?

2. Sometimes we speak of knowing how --- "Do you know how to ride a horse?" We even use a usual noun - 'know how', in talking about this. Knowing how is an ability --- we know how to ride a horse. If we have the ability to ride a horse, in the appropriate situation we can perform the activity in question. If you place me on a horse, you will so  discover the merits of the claim that I know how to ride a horse.

3. But by the far the most frequent use of the word 'know', and the one with which we shall be primarily concerned, is the propositional sense: "I know that .......... ", where the word 'that' is followed by a proposition: "I know that I am a philosophy student", and so on. There is some relation between this last sense of 'know' and the earlier ones. We cannot be acquainted with Smith without knowing something about him, and it is difficult to see how one can know how to swim without knowing some true propositions about swimming, concerning what you must do with your arms and legs when in the water.

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