Acquaintance, Knowledge and Description in Russell

Russell and His Sources for Non-Classical Logics

“…Thus there is no reason to regard this phrase as expressing a constituent of the judgment...." Russell emphasizes this point repeatedly: "The actual object which is the denotation of the description is not...a constituent of propositions in which descriptions occur ...." Thus, propositional knowledge of the sort "the so-and-so is such-and-such" does not involve any epistemic relation whatsoever to the denotation of the description "the so-and-so". [11] continues to analyze the logical consequences of this translation, and concludes that the Russellian conception of denotation and definite descriptions commits one only to an epistemological, rather than an ontological, claim. Two points may be made: (1) it would be fair to conclude that epistemic acquaintance does not entail, for Russell, a commitment to possible worlds or to modalities, let alone to a modal logic; and (2) Bar-Elli's conclusion would seem to justify Jaakko Hintikka's [75] conception that, for Russell, quantifiers range only over objects of acquaintance.…”

“…ix-x] compares to MDL, the set of definitions upon which Russell's putative simplest modal logic is based (see, e.g. [43, p. 199, n. 5]) 11. …”

Kierkegaard on Knowledge and Faith

“…38 There is in Kierkegaard's choice of the word Samviden (co-knowledge) as opposed to Viden (knowledge) a clear etymological implication that he does not have a propositional conception of knowledge in mind here,39 but rather something closer to what Bertrand Russell called "knowledge by acquintance", in so far as it involves a direct apprehen sion of its object. 40 It would not be implausible to suppose, therefore, that there is a sense in which the development of conscience is at the same time a kind of re collection of God. In this sense of recollection, however, there is no pre sumption that the process it describes yields objectively certain know ledge of its content, it is characterized rather as a process of moral and spiritual development through which the individual strives to become transparent in the power that grounds its being.41 This transparency be fore God, as Kierkegaard explains in The Sickness Unto Death, is pre cisely the religious conscience.…”

"Prufrock" between Acquaintance and Description: Bertrand Russell and T. S. Eliot

“…One answer may be found in the way Russell situates the chapter "Acquaintance and Description," adapted from the 1911 paper, within the overall structure of his introductory handbook, The Problems of Philosophy. 7 Tellingly, it comes right after the chapter titled "Idealism." Russell's distinction mediated his break with the British Hegelians and marks a critical moment in a subsequently perceived bifurcation of philosophical traditions, concurrent with the emergence of literary modernism and possibly even constitutive of it.…”