The Normative Profile of Knowledge by Acquaintance

ABSTRACT 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.