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‘Knowledge’ has no meaning unless it means that someone knows something, and this, as I hope to show, is an assertion of relationship, or of some part of a relationship.
The term, ‘knowledge’, I propose provisionally to employ to describe a state of mind indissolubly associated with a relationship between communicable awareness on the one hand, and the object of which the person feels thus aware of the other.
I must give some explanation of my choice of the term, ‘communicable awareness’: the term, ‘communicable’, is not synonymous with ‘conscious’, for a person may be conscious of something yet unable to communicate his awareness. Or he may be unconsciously aware of it and yet able to communicate his awareness to another who can interpret his communication though he himself cannot. I may be unconscious of my fear of something of which I am aware (and indeed of my awareness of it) and yet communicate my fear to another who has no difficulty in understanding from my communication that I am afraid, and of what it is that I am afraid. Obviously such communication depends for its efficacy on the capacity for receptiveness of the receiver, and therefore there can be no hard and fast way of determining the point at which awareness may be said to be communicable. But this is a difficulty that will be discussed when we come to the problem of restatement of a hypothesis in terms of empirically verifiable data. For the present I wish simply to establish my contention that the awareness must be communicable.
The instance I have given (that I might communicate my awareness of something that I fear) may serve as an introduction to the kind of relationship with an object which I claim when I say that I know it. I may say that I fear an object, but this statement does not include the statement that I know it. Indeed it may be an essential feature of my fear that I do not know it. But the statement that I know it may include the fact, stated or not, that I fear it. In some respects, t