‘Sense Certainty’, or Why Russell had no ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance’

Abstract

Famously, by launching analytic philosophy Moore and Russell revolted against British Idealism, with Hegel tossed in for good measure. In 1923 Russell declared:I should take ‘back to the 18th century’ as a battle-cry, if I could entertain any hope that others would rally to it. (CP 9:39)To Russell, the philosophical headmaster of the Eighteenth Century was Hume, not Kant. Russell sought to dispatch rationalism with his logically sophisticated empiricism, based on ‘knowledge by acquaintance’: the non-conceptual apprehension of simples. He sought to dispatch Hegel in particular by condemning his alleged conflation of the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication.The battle lines thus drawn between analytic philosophy and (especially) Hegel's philosophy have had deep, lasting and very unfortunate consequences in the field. Hence it is all the more tragic that neither of Russell's criticisms of Hegel is sound. Sense Certainty presumes that the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of predication are the same, or rather, that it can dispense with predication and hence with any predicative use of ‘is’. Hegel accepts Sense Certainty's presumption as a premise in his reductio ad absurdum argument against sense certainty. Thus Hegel shares rather than denies Russell's thesis about the two senses of ‘is’. However, Hegel further argues that predication is required in order to identify any particular one presumes to know. In this way, Hegel refutes Russell's ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ just over a century in advance.