Chastain (1975) and Sawyer (2012), among others, claim that direct cognitive relations can be initiated in evidence cases. Direct cognitive relations will here include Chastain’s knowledge-of and Sawyer’s trace-based acquaintance, as well as related notions such as having-in-mind and singular thought. Against this controversial claim, it is often objected that such cases are better understood as cases of inference rather than cases of direct thought. When one detects something by its footprint, the objection goes, one merely infers that it exists rather than thinking of it directly. The goal of this paper is to analyze what is meant by the inference objection and consider several possible responses to it. Ultimately, I will not offer a knock-down argument against the inference explanation; in fact, I’ll try to explain why I suspect one isn’t possible. Instead, I’ll appeal to the possibility of misdescription and analogous cases involving non-human animals to show that the inference explanation is less plausible than the account to which it provides an alternative.

Chastain（1975）和Sawyer（2012）等主张在证据案件中可以建立直接的认知关系。直接认知关系这里将包括Chastain的知识和Sawyer的基于痕迹的相识，以及相关的概念，例如具有专心的思想和单一的思想。反对这个有争议的主张，通常有人反对将这种情况更好地理解为推论而不是直接思考的情况。当有人通过它的足迹检测到某物时，就会提出异议，这仅仅是推断它的存在，而不是直接考虑它。本文的目的是分析推理异议的含义，并考虑对它的几种可能的响应。归根结底，我不会对推论的解释提供具体的论据。实际上，我将尝试解释为什么我怀疑不可能。反而，