Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, logician, essayist and

social critic best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. The
Problems of Philosophy is a 1912 book by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, in which the
author attempts to create a brief and accessible guide to the problems of philosophy. He devotes
the fifth chapter of it to an elucidation of knowledge of things. He further distinguishes two types
of knowledge of things, knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.

knowledge by acquaintance
We have knowledge by acquaintance when we are directly aware of a thing, without any
inference. We are immediately conscious and acquainted with a color or hardness of a table
before us, our sense-data. Since acquaintance with things is logically independent from any
knowledge of truths, we can be acquainted with something immediately without knowing any
truth about it. I can know the color of a table "perfectly and completely when I see it" and not
know any truth about the color in itself.

According to this outline, knowledge by acquaintance forms the bedrock for all of our other
knowledge. Sense-data is not the only instance of things with which we can be immediately
acquainted. For how would we recall the past, Russell argues, if we could only know what was
immediately present to our senses. Beyond sense-data, we also have "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. Beyond sense-data and memories, we possess "acquaintance by
introspection." When we are aware of an awareness, like in the case of hunger, "my desiring
food" becomes an object of acquaintance. Introspective acquaintance is a kind of acquaintance
with our own minds that may be understood as self-consciousness. However, this
self-consciousness is really more like a consciousness of a feeling or a particular thought; 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.

Russell summarizes our acquaintance with things as follows: "We have acquaintance in sensation
with the data of the outer senses, and in introspection with the data of what may be called the
inner sense—thoughts, feelings, desires, etc.; we have acquaintance in memory with things
which have been data either of the outer senses or of the inner sense. Further, it is probable,
though not certain, that we have acquaintance with Self, as that which is aware of things or has
desires towards things." All these objects of acquaintance are particulars, concrete, existing
things. Russell cautions that we can also have acquaintance with abstract, general ideas called
universals.

knowledge by description
We have knowledge of things 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 (our subjective sense-data).

The most conspicuous things that are known to us by description are physical objects and other
people's minds. We approach a case of having knowledge by description when we know "that
there is an object answering to a definite description, though we are not acquainted with any
such object." 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 uses 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.

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. Summing up, Russell writes
that the fundamental principle in the analysis of propositions containing descriptions is this:
Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which
we are acquainted.

Difference between two

To usefully distinguish particulars from universals, Russell posits the example of "the most
long-lived of men," a description which wholly consists of universals. We assume that the
description must apply to some man, but we have no way of inferring any judgment about him.
Russell remarks, "all knowledge of truths, as we shall show, demands acquaintance with things
which are of an essentially different character from sense-data, the things which are sometimes
called 'abstract ideas', but which we shall call 'universals'." The description composed only of
universals gives no knowledge by acquaintance with which we might anchor an inference 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 (like something heard or read).