Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

Quotes

Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description

There are two sorts of knowledge: knowledge of things, and knowledge of truths. [Knowledge of things is further divided into knowledge by acquaintance, and knowledge by description.]

We have seen that it is possible, without absurdity, to doubt whether there is a table at all, whereas it is not possible to doubt the sense-data.

When I am acquainted with "my seeing the sun," it seems plain that I am acquainted with two different things in relation to each other. On the one hand there is the sense - datum which represents the sun to me, on the other hand there is that which sees this sense-datum.

Theory of Knowledge

Among the prejudices with which I started, I should enumerate six as especially important:

1. It seemed to me desirable to emphasize the continuity between animal and human minds...

2. Along with the prejudice in favor of behaviorist methods there went another prejudice in favor of explanations in terms of physics whenever possible...

3. I feel that the concept of "experience" has been very much over-emphasized, especially in Idealist philosophy, but also in many forms of empiricism... Everybody, in fact, accepts innumerable propositions about things not experienced, but when people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid...

4. I think that all knowledge as to what there is in the world, if not direct from facts known through perception or memory, must be inferred from premises of which one, at least, is known by perception or memory.

5. One of the things that I realized in 1918 was that I had not paid enough attention to "meaning" and to linguistic problems generally. It was then that I began to be aware of the many problems concerned with the relation between words and things.

6. The last... most important in all my thinking. My method is invariably to start from something vague but puzzling, something which seems indubitable but which I cannot express with any precision... I find that by fixity of attention divisions and distinctions appear where none at first was visible, just as through a microscope you can see the bacilli in impure water which without the microscope are not discernible.

There are many who decry analysis, but it has seemed to me evident, as in the case of impure water, that analysis gives new knowledge without destroying any of the previously existing knowledge.

It seems to me that philosophical investigation, as far as I have experience of it, starts from that curious and insatisfactory state of mind in which one feels complete certainty without being able to say what one is certain of.