The speckled hen problem

•  A second difficulty has to do with knowledge of our own mental states—sometimes referred to as knowledge by acquaintance. According to the “speckled hen” problem, there are aspects of our mental states, such as the rich detail of one's present visual experience, that we are not capable of knowing—e.g., if one is looking at a speckled hen, there will be a determinate number of speckles in one's visual experience, which one will not be able to know just in virtue of having the experience
• In the theory of empirical knowledge, the problem of the speckled hen is whether a single immediate observation of a speckled hen provides a certain knowledge of the number of speckles observed. Clearly, this is not an isolated example, and the therefore it is of fundamental nature.^[1] Philosophically, this problem probes the limits of knowledge by acquaintance: the existence of determinate things in one's experience one is unable to know with certainty merely by the virtue of the experienc
• One can claim certainty in our observations when it is the case that what we see is  is subjectively and objectively immune to doubt