Russellian Acquaintance Revisited

Introduction

philosophers sometimes claim that in his 1912 work, The Problems of Philosophy (hereafter cited as POP), and possibly as early as “on Denoting” (1905), Russell conceives of acquaintance with sense-data as providing an indubitable or certain foundation for empirical knowledge.¹ However, although he does say things suggestive of this view in certain of his 1914 works, Russell also makes remarks in POP that conflict with any Cartesian interpretation of this work.² He says, for example, that all our knowledge of truths “is infected with some degree of doubt, and a theory which ignored this fact would be plainly wrong” (POP 135). And again: “It is of course possible that all or any of our beliefs may be mistaken, and therefore all ought to be held with at least some slight element of doubt” (POP 25). A distinctively Cartesian brand of foundationalism, then, is not what lies behind Russell’s interest in acquaintance in POP or behind the various distinctions in which it figures. But what then does?³

The present article aims to tackle this question by tracing the development of Russell’s conceptions of (knowledge by) acquaintance and knowledge by description as they unfold during the years 1900–1918. In particular, I will focus on what Russell sees as being the philosophical significance of two distinctions he draws that involve the notion of (knowledge by) acquaintance. On the one hand, there is:

Distinction A: (Knowledge by) acquaintance versus knowledge by description

and, on the other hand, there is

Distinction B: (Knowledge by) acquaintance versus knowledge of truths (knowledge about).⁴

Although philosophers have sometimes conflated these distinctions,⁵ it is important to keep them sharply distinguished. For they mean different things and—or so I shall argue—differ strikingly in what Russell wants to do with them.

Russell explicitly formulates distinction A for the first time in some study notes from 1903 entitled “Points about Denoting” (hereafter cited as PAD).⁶ These notes also contain his first explicit formulation of (some version of) the Principle of Acquaintance (hereafter cited as POA).⁷ Distinction B, which Russell inherits from William James—who in turn inherits it from Hermann von Helmholtz and John Grote—is, by contrast, not formulated with any precision until the spring of 1911, when—or so I shall argue—Russell returned to James’s treatment of acquaintance in preparation for writing his article “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description” (hereafter cited as KAKD).⁸ Nonetheless, as I shall argue, Russell had a more-or-less firm grip on the distinction from 1903 onward.

Russell deploys distinctions A and B against two rather different targets. He appeals to distinction A—and to the thesis that we may know by description certain things with which we lack acquaintance—in the course of challenging the restrictive epistemology of understanding that is—or seems to be—espoused by James in his Principles of Psychology, and which James himself derives—or thinks he derives—from Locke. According to this epistemology, acquaintance—or in James’s terminology “sensation”—is both an enabling condition of thought, and hence of knowledge, and the limiting condition of them.⁹ In other words, for James we are able to think about anything with which we are—or can be—acquainted, but only about such things.

Russell, I shall argue, seeks to replace James’s epistemology of understanding with a view that resembles it insofar as it treats acquaintance as an enabling condition of thought and knowledge (of truths), but that also differs from it insofar as it denies that acquaintance sets limits to thought, and hence also to knowledge (of truths).

The philosophical use to which Russell puts distinction B is altogether different. In the summer of 1911, in the course of writing POP, he formulates the doctrine that acquaintance with sense-data constitutes knowledge that is “perfect and complete” (POP 46). He does so, I shall argue, not out of any attachment to a Cartesian version of foundationalism, but rather because he sees this thesis as a way to resist an argument for a certain holistic conception of knowledge...