The Problems of Philosophy - Chapter 5

(Originally written September 19, 2005 in Book 2)

The Problems of Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1912

Chapter Five - Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description

There are two kinds of knowledge:
1. Knowledge of things
2. Knowledge of truths

Knowledge of things is essentially simpler than any knowledge of truths and logically independent of knowledge of truths.

Knowledge of things by description always involves some knowledge of truths as its source and grounding.

Acquaintance comes from anything we are directly aware of. It comes from our sense-data.

Description comes from connecting truths of physical objects to our sense data.

There is no state of mind in which we are directly aware of physical objects; all our knowledge of physical objects is really a knowledge of truths. The physical object is not known to us at all.

While we may not know the physical object, we do know a description that corresponds to just one physical object.

All our knowledge (both knowledge of things and knowledge of truths) base their foundation on acquaintance.

Sense-data is the simplest form of acquaintance, but if it were the only source of acquaintance we would know nothing of the past, or even that the past existed.

We have to consider acquaintance with other things besides sense-data if we are to obtain any tolerably adequate analysis of our knowledge.

Memory is an acquaintance.

Memory occurs when we remember what we have seen or heard or had otherwise present to our senses.

The next extension of acquaintance is introspection, or self-consciousness.

Introspection is where we are aware of what we are doing, even if we are only doing it in our mind.

"Although acquaintance with ourselves seems probably to occur, it is not wise to assert that it undoubtedly does occur".

We have acquaintance with the outer world through the senses, acquaintance with the inner world through introspection, acquaintance with the past through memory, and probably acquaintance with our self, as that which is aware of things or has desires towards things.

Knowledge by description is important because it enables us to pass beyond the limits of our own personal experiences.