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Knowledge by acquaintance and Knowledge by description by

Russell
Continental Philosophy (University of Delhi)

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How did Russell explain the difference between

Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by
Description? Do you think that this difference is
an exhaustive one? Elucidate.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell was a British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic
best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. In his work
“Problems of philosophy” in analytic philosophy, he discusses the distinction between two
kinds of knowledge of truth : that which is direct, intuitive, certain and infallible and that
which is indirect, uncertain, derivative and open to error. He states that propositions with the
highest degree of self-evidence include “those which merely state what is given in sense, and
also certain abstract logical and arithmetical principles, and some ethical propositions”. After
distinguishing two types of knowledge : knowledge of things and knowledge of truths he
elucidates his discussion of knowledge of things. Russell further distinguishes knowledge of
things in two types : knowledge of things by acquaintance, which is logically independent of
knowledge of truths and second is knowledge of things by description that always involve
some knowledge of truth in source and ground. Before moving on to these two distinctions
Russell discusses acquaintance and description.

We have knowledge by acquaintance of anything when we are directly aware of things.

There is no need for any intermediary process of inference. For instance, on seeing a table,
one is immediately aware about the appearance i.e. hardness, colour, smoothness, shape etc,
of the table through sense-data. The particular characteristic of the table may have many
things said about it and may have been explained theoretically many times but one will never
get better knowledge of that characteristic as they have on seeing it. Thus, the sense-data
which make up the appearance of the things with which we have acquaintance, things
immediately known to us just as they are. The other type of knowledge of things is called
knowledge by description. When we say we have knowledge of the table itself, a physical
object, we refer to a kind of knowledge other than immediate, direct knowledge. "The
physical object which causes such-and-such sense-data" is a phrase that describes the table
by way of sense-data. We only have a description of the table. Knowledge by description is
predicated on something with which we are acquainted, sense-data, and some knowledge of
truths, like knowing that "such- and-such sense-data are caused by the physical object."
Thus, knowledge by description allows us to infer knowledge about the actual world via the
things that can be known to us, things with which we have direct acquaintance

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Knowledge by acquaintance forms the bed-rock of all our knowledge. Since, all our
knowledge, both knowledge of truth and knowledge of things, rests upon acquaintance as its
foundation, it is important to consider the things with which we get acquaintance. Sense-
data, as we have considered already, is one among the things with which we are acquainted.
But sense-data is not the sole example as if this would be the case our knowledge would be
very restricted than it is. We would only know about the things now present to our senses and
nothing about the past, nor would we know any truths about our sense data nor the fact that
the past exists. We have therefore considered acquaintance with other things besides
sense-data to obtain adequate analysis of our knowledge.

The first extension beyond sense data is “acquaintance by memory”. Remembering what we
were immediately aware of makes it so that we are still immediately aware of that past,
perceived thing. We may therefore access many past things with the same requisite
immediacy. This immediate knowledge by memory is the source of all our knowledge
concerning the past, without which there would be no knowledge of the past by inference,
since we should never know that there was anything past to be inferred.

The second extension is to be considered as “acquaintance by introspection”. In this we are

aware of an awareness. For instance, when one says ‘I desire food’, the person is aware of his
desire for food. Thus “person’s desiring food” is an object with which he is aware. Similarly,
we may be aware of our feelings such as pleasure and pain. This kind of acquaintance, which
is sometimes called self-consciousness, is the source of knowledge of all our mental things.
Russell clears the view that this self consciousness is not consciousness of our self but the
consciousness of particular thoughts and feelings : the awareness rarely includes the explicit
use of "I," which would identify the Self as a subject. Russell abandons this strand of
knowledge, knowledge of the Self, as a probable but unclear dimension of acquaintance.

In addition to our acquaintance with particular existing things, we also have acquaintance
with universals i.e. general ideas of whiteness, brotherhood, diversity etc. every complete
sentence has one word that is universal as all verbs have meaning. awareness of universal is
called conceiving and a universal of which we are aware is called concept.

Moving on to description, by which Russell means any phrase of the form “the so-and-so”.
An object is known by description when we know that it is “the so-and-so” i.e. when we
know that there is only one object with certain properties. For instance, We know that the
candidate who gets the most votes will be elected, and in this case we are very likely also
acquainted with the man who is the candidate who will get most votes; but we do not know
which of the candidates he is, i.e. we do not know any proposition of the form ‘A is the

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candidate who will get most votes’ where A is one of the candidates by name. We shall say
that we have ‘merely descriptive knowledge’ of the so-and-so when, although we know that
the so-and-so exists, and although we may possibly be acquainted with the object which is, in
fact, the so-and-so, yet we do not know any proposition ‘a is the so-and-so’, where a is
something with which we are acquainted.

Russell offers several illustrations in the service of understanding knowledge by description.

He claims that it is important to understand this kind of knowledge because our language
depends so heavily on it. When we say common words or proper names, we are really
relying on the meanings implicit in descriptive knowledge. The thought connoted by the use
of a proper name can only really be explicitly expressed through a description or proposition.
Moreover, the description through which thoughts are expressed may vary from person to
person and from time-to-time. The only thing constant is the object to which the name
applies.

Bismarck, or "the first Chancellor of the German Empire," is Russell's most cogent example.
Imagine that there is a proposition, or statement, made about Bismarck. If Bismarck is the
speaker, admitting that he has a kind of direct acquaintance with his own self, Bismarck
might have voiced his name in order to make a self-referential judgment, of which his name
is a constituent. In this simplest case, the "proper name has the direct use which it always
wishes to have, as simply standing for a certain object, and not for a description of the
object." If one of Bismarck's friends who knew him directly was the speaker of the statement,
then we would say that the speaker had knowledge by description. The speaker is acquainted
with sense-data which he infers corresponds with Bismarck's body. The body or physical
object representing the mind is "only known as the body and the mind connected with these
sense-data," which is the vital description. Since the sense-data corresponding to Bismarck
changes from moment to moment and with perspective, the speaker knows which various
descriptions are valid.

Still more removed from direct acquaintance, imagine that someone like you or I comes
along and makes a statement about Bismarck that is a description based on a "more or less
vague mass of historical knowledge." We say that Bismarck was the "first Chancellor of the
German Empire." In order to make a valid description applicable to the physical object,
Bismarck's body, we must find a relation between some particular with which we have
acquaintance and the physical object, the particular with which we wish to have an indirect
acquaintance. We must make such a reference in order to secure a meaningful description.

Russell uses the example of "the most long-lived of mankind," which is entirely made up of
universals, to help separate particulars from universals. We think the description refers to a

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man, but we have no means of knowing whether or not we should pass judgement on him.
"All knowledge of truths, as we shall show, requires contact with things that are essentially
different from sense-data, the things that are often called 'abstract notions,' but which we
shall name 'universals," Russell says. The description based solely on universals provides no
knowledge from which we might draw conclusions about the longest-lived man. A further
statement about Bismarck, like "The first Chancellor of the German Empire was an astute
diplomatist," is a statement that contains particulars and asserts a judgment that we can only
make in virtue of some acquaintance.
In our language, statements about objects known through description function as statements
about the "real thing described," implying that we aim to refer to that thing. When Bismarck
makes a declaration about himself, something with which he has intimate acquaintance, we
intend to express something with the direct authority that only Bismarck himself could have.
There is, however, a spectrum of distance from familiarity with the crucial particulars: from
Bismarck himself, "there is Bismarck to people who knew him; Bismarck to those who only
know of him via history," to "the longest lived of men" at the far end of the spectrum. We can
only make assertions that are logically deduced from universals at the later end, but at the
former end, we get as close to direct acquaintance as feasible and can make many
propositions identifying the actual object. It is now evident how description-based
knowledge can be reduced to acquaintance-based information. "Every proposition that we
can understand must be formed entirely of constituents with which we are familiar," Russell
says of this insight, which he calls his fundamental premise in the study of "propositions
including descriptions."

If we are to expressively attach meanings to the words we usually use, indirect knowledge of
some particulars appears to be required. We plainly have no personal knowledge of Julius
Caesar when we say something about him. Rather, we're thinking about phrases like "the guy
who was slain on the Ides of March" or "the Roman Empire's founder." Because we can't
meet Julius Caesar in person, we can only learn about him through description, which allows
us to learn about "things we've never experienced." It enables us to move beyond the
confines of our immediate, private experiences and engage in public knowledge and
language.

Thus, to conclude we can say, It is a type of knowledge theory that believes human use of
language to be significant and deserving of further investigation. Russell thinks about how
we make sense of things that aren't part of our everyday lives. The realm of familiarity
provides the most reliable sources of information for our comprehension of the world. We
can make inferences from our domain of acquaintance using knowledge by description, but it
puts us in a more vulnerable position. Because descriptive knowledge is based on truths, we

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are prone to making errors in our descriptive knowledge if we are erroneous about a
proposition we believe to be true.

Submitted by :
Name - Apeksha Modi
Roll No. - 0288
Course - BA(Hons) Philosophy

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