All knowledge is, in Russell’s view, built on acquaintance.
Without knowledge by description, however, we would never pass beyond
the limits of our own individual experience. Thus, just like perceptual
and a priori knowledge, knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge
by description work together to create a totality of human knowledge.
Analysis
The Problems of Philosophy represents
Russell’s first major attempt at mapping out a theory of epistemology,
or a theory of the nature of human knowledge. Russell’s attempt
to discern what kinds of knowledge, if any, could be considered
reasonably certain is similar to the goal of Principia Mathematica,
which is to find an undeniable reason for believing in the supposed
truths of mathematics. Both branches of Russell’s work—the mathematical
and the more traditionally philosophical—have at their heart Russell’s
steadfast devotion to rigorous analysis and his reluctance to accept
any proposition (no matter how obvious or commonsense seeming) without
a concrete, logical reason for doing so.
Beginning with this work and continuing through Our
Knowledge of the External World and beyond, Russell sought
to describe the relationship between knowledge, perception, and
physics (the study of the material, physical world). Fundamental
to Russell’s theories was a belief that the physical world does,
in fact, exist. Almost two decades earlier, Russell had rejected
idealism—the theory that reality is not physical but exists only
in the mind—in favor of realism, the belief that objects exist independently
of our perception or experience. The theories of epistemology described
in Problems of Philosophy fit squarely within the
British empiricist tradition, in that they claim that the data gained
from personal, immediate experience is the starting point of all
human knowledge. In Russell’s system, data gained from personal,
immediate experience are termed “knowledge by acquaintance.”
According to Russell, any proposition we know “by description” must
be wholly made up of things we know by acquaintance. If we assume
this, then there are some consequences for what, exactly, it is possible
to know by description. Suppose you make a proposition about Julius
Caesar: you say, for example, “Julius Caesar launched the first
Roman invasion of Britain.” You are not actually acquainted with
Julius Caesar himself, since you have no direct, immediate experience
of the man. What you hold in your mind is a description of
him. You may know of him as “the founder of the Roman Empire,” for
example, or “the man assassinated on the Ides of March,” or “the
subject of the marble bust in my local library.” Thus, when you
say, “Julius Caesar launched the first Roman invasion of Britain,”
you’re not really asserting something about the real Julius Caesar—you
can’t be, as you have no direct knowledge of him. Instead, you’re
asserting something about the collection of facts and ideas about
Caesar with which you are acquainted. No matter
how many facts we may learn about Caesar, we can still only know
him by description. We can never reach a point where we directly
know him by acquaintance. The general thrust of this argument foreshadows
Russell’s work in logical atomism, which argues that statements
can be broken down into a series of constituent assumptions. The
argument is also tied to Russell’s Theory of Descriptions, which
explains how definite descriptions—phrases like that cat, Bill
Cosby, or my mother, which refer to specific,
particular objects—are just shorthand for a series of logical claims. Similarly,
when we use the phrase Julius Caesar, we’re using
the name to refer not to the man himself but to a series of facts
and descriptions we have learned about him.
The Problems of Philosophy was meant
to be an introduction to the field, and as such, Russell’s arguments
aren’t as thorough as we might expect from the founder of analytic
philosophy. He often errs on the side of “illustrating” his points
rather than meticulously mapping them out. While the book makes
strong appeals to common sense, there are still elements that have
greatly troubled critics. One such problem lies with Russell’s notion
of intuitive knowledge. Russell never satisfactorily explains what,
exactly, makes a truth self-evident, and he does not provide sufficient
examples of these intuitive, immediate truths. Russell also provides
no plan for distinguishing between two apparently self-evident truths
that nevertheless contradict each other.
The concept of sense-data, as set out by Russell, has
also proved problematic. Russell takes it as a given that sense-data
are the building blocks of perception. We look at a table and we
sense its brownness, its hardness, and its rectangularity. From
these sense-data, we construct our idea of the table. Other philosophers
argue that, upon seeing a table, we are immediately aware of the
object as a table, and it is only later, when we
stop to concentrate on what we see, that we consciously notice the
object’s color, its texture, or its shape. According to these thinkers,
sense-data as defined by Russell cannot be the most primitive, direct
element of experience because it requires too much conscious effort
to be aware of them.
