- As you know, philosophical articles in academic journals are often preceded by an abstract. Such abstracts tell readers what to expect in the article, but also try to convince them of its importance. Russell’s chapter, ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description’ has no abstract. Your assignment is to write a 250-300 word abstract in which you give a brief outline of Russell’s arguments and claims and also explain what their importance is according to Russell.
According to Russell, “[e]very proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted” (p. 26); to explain how one is nonetheless able to know things they have never directly encountered, he introduces a split between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.
The former, in his view, consists of direct, non-inferential relations to things: sense-data, introspection, memory, universals, and (probably) the Self. These are the things we experience directly, such as a color as it impresses itself on an observer - and out of which we can construct further descriptions.
Descriptions pick out something we are not acquainted with as the so-and-so, a single thing with a given property. Physical objects, other minds, and whatever else we know of the world outside our direct acquaintance are only known by description. As Russell exemplifies, we describe “the man who was assassinated on the Ides of March” (p. 27); if the statement corresponds to a single individual (namely, Julius Caesar) we have knowledge of that man, despite never having met him.
Names, in turn, can serve as shorthand descriptions: in Russell’s own examples, referring to Caesar can be expanded to “the man whose name was Julius Caesar,” “the founder of the Roman Empire,” or, as seen prior, “the man who was assassinated on the Ides of March” (p. 27). Depending on the person, all three descriptions could be understood from the invocation of the same name.
To Russell, this is significant because it explains how knowledge about things we can never directly reach from within our own mind - such as the past, other minds or the physical world - is nonetheless possible to obtain, with reference only to “terms which we have experienced in acquaintance” (p. 27).
- Frege’s discussion of identity statements a = a and a = b motivates a key distinction between sense and reference. What does Frege mean by sense and what does he mean by reference? How does his example of the “morning star” and the “evening star” illustrate this distinction?
Per Frege, the identity a = a is possible to ascertain a priori - to say that something equals itself can be derived through analysis and is largely trivial. When we equate a to b, however, we obtain new information: such is the case, for instance, when we discover that “morning star” and “evening star,” in actuality, denote the same object. This distinguishes the sense of a sign (its mode of presentation) from its reference - the object it designates.
A useful analogy Frege gives is that of the telescope: the moon is the reference, the real image in the telescope is the sense, and the idea is an individual’s retinal image of the real image of the moon within the telescope. The sense, between all potential observers by the telescope, is objective; their retinal image, however, is not.
Sense, thus, is the way that something is presented - for instance, the planet Venus in the sky early in the night, as opposed to early in the morning, results in the differing senses “evening star” and “morning star” - while reference is the actual object to which those representations refer - in our case, the planet Venus.
- Frege finds that, for declarative sentences, the thought “must rather be considered as the sense” (Frege, 41) and that we must accept the “truth value of a sentence as constituting its reference” (Frege, 42). How does he reach each of these conclusions?
Let us take up Frege’s own example, from page 41, of the sentences “The morning star is a body illuminated by the Sun,” and “The evening star is a body illuminated by the Sun.” One unaware of the identity of the morning and evening star, per Frege, could simultaneously think one of those sentences to be true, while holding the other to be false. As such, the sentences must be expressing different thoughts. And, if the sentence expresses the thought, it follows that the thought is the sense of the sentence.
To show that the truth value constitutes the reference, Frege takes recourse to a discussion of fictional names. In his view, the reference of the whole is determined by the references of its parts. As a result, he claims, because the name Odysseus lacks a referent, there cannot be a reference to a sentence such as “Odysseus was set ashore […]” as a whole, either. The sentence clearly retains a sense, but lacks a reference. At the same time, discussion of fictional characters largely forgoes caring about the truth. Tying these two facts together, Frege argues that if one is asking about the reference of a sentence, they must be asking whether that sentence is true.
He further substantiates this by reference to the example regarding Venus. The astute contemporary reader will know both “morning star” and “evening star” to refer to the same object. We have shown above that the thought changes, but, given that we are substituting identities for one another, the reference of the sentence (if one, as Frege does, takes the referent of the whole sentence to be decided by the references of its parts) must remain the same. Whatever survives the substitution, then, would be the reference - per Frege, this is the truth value.