The capacity to represent one’s own position supports persistence ([§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>)). A being whose picture of its own position corresponds to the actual medium continues; a being whose picture systematically misdirects does not. Selection therefore tracks accuracy. Any being that persists for long will have capacities shaped by the pressure to get the medium right, not because it was designed to, but because beings lacking those capacities dropped out. The laws of thought are not rules imposed on cognition from outside; they are the shape cognition takes once selection has tuned a being to track a medium with T, S, and Φ.

The structural account proposes that systems capable of reliably representing their own situation may develop several ways of representing, enacting, or experiencing their environments. It does not follow that every such being tracks its medium correctly, develops all three of the book's proposed forms, or has knowledge by acquaintance in a phenomenological sense. Propositional knowledge (knowing that), procedural knowledge (knowing how), and knowledge by acquaintance (knowing what it is like) are influential but contested categories whose relations remain live topics in epistemology and philosophy of mind.

Propositional knowledge is orientation held as a model. *The door is locked.* *Water boils at 100°C at sea level.* *My flight leaves at 7.* It can be stated, examined, disputed, revised. It can be transmitted to other beings via language ([§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>)). It can be wrong in the specific way propositional content is wrong: by failing to correspond to what obtains. Gettier (1963) showed that justified true belief is not sufficient for propositional knowledge: a belief can be justified, true, and still not count as knowledge if the justification is only accidentally connected to the truth. The post-Gettier literature developed the response in several directions. Goldman's (1979, 1986) reliabilism replaced justification with the requirement that the belief be produced by a reliable cognitive process. Sosa's (1980, 2007) virtue epistemology took the move one step deeper: reliable tracking must be exercised as a competence of the knower, so knowledge is apt belief, true because competent. Williamson (2000) declined the analytic project altogether, arguing that knowledge is not analyzable at all into more basic conditions; knowledge comes first, and belief and justification are better understood in its light. The structural account is congenial to all three moves. Reliable tracking is what selection builds when self-modeling beings persist in a medium with T, S, and Φ. Competence is the being whose orientation-holding has been shaped by reliable engagement. And knowledge-first, in Williamson's sense, is what the analysis looks like from inside the account: orientation held in any of the three forms is not further reducible to stance-free relations between stance-free inventories and stance-free inventoriers.

Procedural knowledge is orientation encoded in the being itself. The cyclist who cannot explain balance in words knows something a kinesiology textbook does not capture, not because the knowledge is hidden, but because it is held at a level the textbook cannot access. The athlete's timing, the musician's ear, the craftsman's hand, the native speaker's grammatical intuition: each is a being shaped by repeated structural engagement until the correct response is direct. Ryle (1949) established that knowing how is not reducible to knowing that. Polanyi (1966) pressed the point to its limit: *we know more than we can tell*. The body is Physicality, which is shaped by persisting through what it encounters.

Acquaintance is orientation instantiated directly. What red looks like, what grief feels like, what the taste of coffee is like from inside: these are not propositions and not procedural skills. They are the first-person perspective of a structural process encountered from within. Russell (1910–11) named this form as distinct from knowledge by description. Nagel's (1974) 'what it is like' question asks for acquaintance, and answers to it cannot be given propositionally because the content is not propositional.

The three forms are nested rather than parallel. Propositional knowledge presupposes acquaintance: to hold a model of the medium, the being must occupy a position within the medium and encounter it from inside. A knower with no acquaintance has no position from which modeling could begin. Acquaintance presupposes Physicality-level continuity: to be acquainted with anything, the being must persist through the encounter as the same subject. An acquainted knower who cannot carry forward what was encountered has no acquaintance: only a sequence of disconnected instants. And procedural knowledge presupposes both: the body shaped by encounter must persist through the shaping, and the shaping is acquisition of acquaintance with what the encounters are like.

Each form is the being's grasp held from a position within structure: propositional as model, procedural as encoding, acquaintance as direct instantiation. Without the position, no form has anything to be a form of.


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← [8.3.2 What is Required](<8.3.2 What is Required.md>) | [8.3.4 What is Confirmed](<8.3.4 What is Confirmed.md>) →
