Knowledge and justification
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Bertrand Russell, Acquaintance
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The philosopher Bertrand Russell used the term acquaintance for knowledge that can lead to self-evident truths. "We shall say that we have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge of truths." He goes on to cite sense-data as objects with which we are acquainted; thus, it would appear that he is very much an empiricist, though it later emerges that he is not! Russell draws an important distinction between knowledge of truths (knowing that) and knowledge of things (acquaintance) which it will be helpful to clarify. To take his own example: in perception a person becomes acquainted with sense data. Then he forms a judgement about the sense-data. For example, he may become acquainted with a brown sense-datum. At present, however, he has no knowledge of truth; then he forms the judgement, this sense-datum is brown. The judgement, which is true and certain, is based upon the acquaintance with the sense-datum. Thus, all self-evident truths (if there are any!) are based on direct acquaintance with some object or other. Hence, if Descartes is right about the cogito, what makes the judgement cogito, ergo sum self-evidently true is the direct acquaintance of the mind with itself.
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Contents of
Knowledge and justification
1 The distinction between knowledge and belief
2 Unsound, invalid, possible world and fallacy
3 Counterexample, exposing a fallacy
4 Belief and doubt
5 Believing that and knowing that
6 Knowledge and certainty - the tripartite definition of knowledge
7 True, justified belief
8 Plato: The Theaetetus
9 Plato: Forms
10 The possibility of scepticism and categories of belief
11 Global scepticism
12 The Argument from Authority
13 Valid argument, inference and justification
14 Chain of deductive inferences, self-evident truths
15 Sense experience, empiricism
16 The dialectic method, thesis and antithesis
17 Rationalism and empiricism; the Discourse on the Method
18 The Cogito, Reason and Rational Insight
19 Bertrand Russell, Acquaintance
20 Universals, Forms
21 Scepticism, Existentialism and Faith
22 The evil genius argument
23 Existentialism
24 Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling - the Absurd
25 Foundation for Knowledge
26 Theory of Knowledge, Epistemology and Metaphysics
27 Rationalism, Mathematics and Logic, Innateness
28 Innate Ideas
29 The a priori
30 Truth by convention, Hume and the Method of Doubt
31 Hume and the distinction between belief and knowledge
32 Hume and the definition of belief
33 Truth as a logical operator on sentences
34 The correspondence theory of truth
35 Wittgenstein: On Certainty
36 Wittgenstein and the coherence theory of truth
37 William James and Pragmatism
38 W.V.O. Quine, pragmatism and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism
39 Postivism and pragmatism
40 Pragmatism and utilitarianism
41 Pragmatism and religiion
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