Russell want his cake.. we'll not stand for it!

In chapter 5 of the Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, Russell draws a strict dichotomy between two different systems of knowledge acquisition; the first of these espitemes is called “knowledge through acquaintance” – which includes facts that we become empirically aware of via our observational sense-data and its effect on our beliefs. The second such espiteme is “knowledge through description” – the more elusive sensibility responsible for classifying and categorizing a series of truths through “universals that our sense may not have direct access to”. To illustrate the formal difference between the two systems, Russell uses a rudimentary example of the table he is writing on. Therefore, when we observe a table’s properties (size, shape, and/or color), our conclusions about said properties are known through our acquaintance to it (the object). Contrarily, we know the table to be as such (a table) through description, our understand of certain truths which classify ‘such-and-such object x’ as ‘table’.

Russell further claims that we come to know abstract ideas, what he calls “universals,” through the latter, descriptive type of mental cognition. Yet, earlier in the chapter, he extends the process of knowledge by acquaintance to include various types of awareness. In his example of ‘staring into the sun’, Russell argues that one becomes aware of the sun’s presence through acquaintance. In addition, he also becomes aware of his own awareness [of the sun] through acquaintance. For Russell, the self is known through acquaintance even though it is an abstract concept – this is where I disagree.

The problem I would like to pose for Russell’s epistemology, insofar that he offers one, is that it seems that the mental faculty of self-awareness and the mental capacity to conceive of abstractions are not so ontologically different than Russell argues them to be. Isn’t our awareness of our own consciousness, even in the sun case, the same type of abstraction that is required to contextualize such ‘universals’ as justice, wisdom, theory, etc? Russell would argue that we only probably know our ‘self’ through our acquaintance with it; this is fine, but how is this fundamentally different than the way we come to understand concepts like justice, aesthetics, piety, and so on? Are we not also acquainted with the latter virtues through our cognitive experience just as we are acquainted with color, size, and shape through our senses?

Ostensibly, Russell attempts to create a taxonomy of knowledge that is unsuccessful, not in its novelty, but in its disparate attempts to grant agency to two cognitive functions in contrast. Thus either 1) our epistemology is strict, ordered (like Russell’s says), though Russell is mistaken that our cognitive faculty to think about and conceive of abstractions exists in two different systems or 2) our epistemology is unpredictable, resisting categorization and Russell’s epistemes of acquaintance and description are wrong altogether.

This inconsistency in his epistemological paradigm would not be as much of a problem if Russell relegated knowledge by acquaintance to only describe superficial observation; but he doesn’t leave it there. Russell wants both epistemological systems to be capable of conceiving in abstraction, such that our descriptive tendency can conceptualize and analyze high-order emotions while the acquaintance tendency can describe our self-conscious awareness. Is he trying to have his cake and eat it too? Well I’ll not stand for it… I’m calling him out.