2 Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds
In The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Bertrand Russell creates two helpful and quite-straightforward concepts to explain our knowledge of things: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Russell’s two terms are indebted to the work of Immanuel Kant and Kant’s concepts of a priori and a posteriori knowledge. A priori knowledge is knowledge that can be known prior to, or independent of, an experience; a posteriori knowledge is knowledge that is obtained after, or is dependent upon, experience. For Russell, to return to his two terms, knowledge by acquaintance is having an acquaintance with a direct awareness of a thing, with no intermediate process or knowledge of truth.1 This type ...
