*Skepticism is self-refuting.* The skeptic who asks *how can we know anything?* is performing an act of knowing: persisting across the formulation of the doubt (procedural), distinguishing the doubt from what is doubted (propositional), and holding a reconstructed representation of the doubt (acquaintance). The act is a structured event that demonstrates its conditions. The argument's scope is narrow and worth marking explicitly. What is established is that the *minimal structural conditions* for inquiry are instantiated by anyone who can pose a skeptical question, and that these conditions cannot be coherently doubted by an act that itself instantiates them. What is not established is the falsity of Cartesian demon scenarios, brain-in-a-vat thought experiments, or detailed empirical skepticisms about specific knowledge claims; those engage at the level of which contents are reliably tracked, not at the level of whether tracking is possible at all. What is foreclosed is the global skeptical claim that the structural conditions for knowledge are absent in the being making the claim: that, the act self-refutes. Whether any particular thing the being takes itself to know is in fact known is a separate question the framework leaves to the empirical, mathematical, and historical work that does the local tracking.

*Acquaintance is reconstruction, not a missing fact.* The hardest case for knowledge-as-held-grasp-of-structure is the claim that the acquaintance form names something no structural account can reach: that Mary, who knows every physical fact about color vision, learns a new fact on first seeing red. The account answers that she learns no fact at all. To know what red is is not to hold a proposition about red but to possess a *representation* of it. And a representation is not a stored snapshot but a reconstruction the body re-derives each time, weighing prior encodings against current input. Mary has never run that reconstruction; she holds no library of red-encounters for the process to rebuild from. What she gains on first seeing red is entry into the reconstruction, not a fact about the world. The seeming "extra fact" is just the difference between knowing red is *possible*, its place in the structure of color, which Mary has in full (frame-knowledge), and having built the re-derivable representation (field-coverage). The inside of a black hole marks the same gap: the frame licenses that there is one, no body holds a representation of it, and yet no one is tempted to posit a non-physical fact there. Redness has the identical shape. The facts Mary does hold sharpen the point rather than threaten it: none is a stance-free inventory she generated alone, each is the compressed residue of other bodies' reconstructions, encoded into propositional form and transmitted through language ([§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>)). Her physical theory of color is other people's field-coverage, distilled into propositions and inherited, which is exactly why it can be complete *as propositions* and still install no representation. The propositional form transmits; the reconstruction must be run. And because that reconstruction is driven by feeling as much as perception ([§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>)), the representation arrives valenced: the coiled shape on the path is rebuilt as *threat* before the cortex resolves it into a stick (LeDoux's low road), and a single olfactory-receptor variant reconstructs one molecule as fresh herb for some bodies and as soap for others. The valence is learned (we know it from experience) which is why it is written into the representation rather than laid over it: the feel is a real feature of the reconstruction, not an artifact explained away, which is the realist rather than illusionist reading secured at [§4.3.2](<4.3.2 Eliminativism and Illusionism.md>). The acquaintance form is not the exception to knowledge-as-grasp-of-structure; it is the case where the structure grasped is the body's own reconstruction.

*The inverse case of Mary's Room confirms the same independence.* Run Mary's case the other direction: a twin raised in a room filled with nothing but red things — apples, books, every object saturated in the same hue — never given the word, the causal story, or the concept color at all, since with nothing to contrast against, no vocabulary for the category is ever installed. She holds no propositions about red, yet she has run the reconstruction thousands of times over; her acquaintance with red is as full as acquaintance gets. What she gains on leaving the room is the mirror image of what Mary gains on entering it: propositions (the word, the physics, the fact that other colors exist), not a new representation, because the representation was already built. The case holds together only if the room keeps ordinary contrast of shade, edge, and brightness within the single hue; a genuinely uniform field degrades color registration itself rather than sharpening it, since color perception is edge- and contrast-driven, not a passive readout of a flat field. With that condition in place, the reverse case shows the same independence the forward case shows, run the other way: propositional and acquaintance knowledge can each be maximized while the other is held near zero, which is the strongest evidence the two are not reducible to one another.

*Certainty is not uniform across what is known.* Some knowledge is structurally certain because it tracks what any possible medium must instantiate: the modal results of the preceding chapters, the mathematics of necessity, the noun/verb distinction in any propositional language. Other knowledge is reliably approximate because it tracks contingent features of the actual medium: scientific laws, empirical generalizations, historical claims. The difference is not that one is real knowledge and the other is not. The difference is what kind of feature each tracks. Both count as knowledge when reliably held, and fallibility is the normal condition of the second kind.

*Omniscience.* Classical theism attributes to God complete and simultaneous knowledge of everything (Aquinas 1265–1274, *Summa Theologiae* I.14; Swinburne 2016). The most developed form of the position takes the discursive sense of knowing as inadequate to its referent: God's knowledge is not propositional knowing-that but a non-discursive *intellectus*: a single, simple, atemporal grasp by which the divine essence knows itself and, in knowing itself, knows everything else. On the analogical reading, *knows* applies to God neither univocally with the human sense nor equivocally with no shared content, but proportionally: what knowing is at the divine level resembles what it is at the human level only by structural analogy, with the limitations of position, succession, and substrate removed precisely because the divine knower is not the kind of thing those limitations apply to. The position is genuinely sophisticated, and a structural critique that treated it as the cartoon image of a very large database would be missing what the tradition actually said. The structural account meets the position on its own terms. The analogical move preserves *knowing* as a label only by detaching it from the conditions that make knowing the operation it is. *Knowing* in any sense the framework can identify (propositional, procedural, or acquaintance) is the held grasp of structure by a knower positioned within structure. Strip the position, the succession, and the substrate, and what remains is not a higher mode of the same operation but a different operation that no longer answers to the description. The non-discursive *intellectus* is internally coherent as a posit; it is just no longer a posit about *knowing* in the sense the rest of human discourse uses. The structural account does not deny that something could obtain at the divine level that the tradition has been pointing toward; it denies only that the something is intelligibly named *omniscience*. Knowledge unconditioned by position would not be knowledge perfected; it would be the removal of the conditions knowing consists in. Omniscience as classically defined is not a great-making property but the removal of the structural conditions knowing consists in, leaving a label whose application has been preserved by analogy at the cost of the operation the label originally tracked.

*The knower is always a being.* This rules out the picture of knowledge as correspondence between a stance-free inventory and a stance-free inventorier. Not because reality is mind-dependent (it is not; the medium persists whether or not any knower models it) but because knowledge is always someone's orientation from somewhere, not a view from nowhere. The structural account agrees with the realist that what is known is real, and with the antirealist that knowing is always from a position (Putnam 1981; Rorty 1979). Both traditions can be correct simultaneously.

*Inquiry has a structural shape the account predicts.* Configurations that model well continue. Configurations that test their models against the medium continue better. Communities of beings that share models ([§8.10](<8.10 Language.md>)) and test them cooperatively ([§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>)) continue better still. Science, craft, and scholarship are not historical accidents; they are what self-modeling beings with language and morality develop when they coordinate the tracking of the medium across generations. What each inherits from its predecessors is knowledge in all three forms: propositions to revise, procedures to practice, acquaintances to deepen. None of it came from outside the medium. All of it was the medium modeling itself more accurately across time.

Knowledge read structurally distinguishes the conditions of inquiry from the contents inquiry tracks: it dissolves global skepticism while leaving local skepticism intact, grades certainty by what the held grasp is *of* rather than by quality of conviction, exposes classical omniscience as the removal of knowing's conditions rather than their perfection, and explains why every knower is a being rather than a stance-free inventorier. Science, craft, and scholarship are what self-modeling beings developed into when they began coordinating their tracking across generations. The operation that built this knowledge and continues to extend it is taken up at [§8.4](<8.4 Reasoning.md>): reasoning, the recursion testing held grasp against current registration and following the medium's constraints from the test.


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← [8.3.4 What is Confirmed](<8.3.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [8.4 Reasoning](<8.4 Reasoning.md>) →
