 Well, what has Russell left us with? Well, we know that we exist. We know that we have our sense that that's what we get that's beyond a shadow of a doubt. What we get out of a simpler argument or a simpler explanation is that there is a physical world around us. So we get that question. We answer yes to the question, is there a world around us? And to ask the question, what is the nature of these objects? Well, we don't really get the answer what is the nature of these objects, but we get to know how they affect us. And that's a lot. I mean, that's a lot of what the physical sciences are. We get to know how they affect each other. And that's good. That's good knowledge. But it's not the nature of the objects. There's something different there. Okay. In this chapter, or this section, Russell is going to contrast his view to idealism. He still hasn't, you know, everything we've said so far, he says, has still has a completely ruled out idealism. He wants to be able to do that because idealism is the claim that whatever exists is mental. Whatever exists is just mental happens in the mind. And he doesn't mean the brain. He means the mind. There's plenty of brains without minds, Barkley would say. It's plenty of brains without, or, you know, if you're trying to contrast the tip, it's plenty of brains without minds or dead people, right? Lots of brains. No minds. Well, a mind is something that is not physical for Barkley. Okay. So we're dealing with something, if we're Barkley, everything that exists is mental. Now, Russell wants to include physical objects. He wants to say that there are also physical objects. He's probably not saying that there's only physical objects. He's probably not doing that. And he is going to say that there's at least physical objects that exist, right? So he needs to reject Barkley and idealism. So the purpose of this chapter is to do just that, is to reject idealism. Now the main claim, the main push of his claim to reject idealism is the distinction in kinds of knowledge, knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. So let's see what he has to say about Barkley. Let's look at Barkley's argument and see how Russell will reject idealism, Barkley and idealism by making this distinction in knowledge. So I'm out here in this park, and I'm experiencing a lot, right? I see colors, right? You see this vivid green behind me? I hear the birds chirping, I see here some cars off in the distance, I see clouds, blue sky. I'm about to write a song, it's so pretty out here. Now I'm getting a lot from my senses, right? That's a lot of knowledge from my senses. Now believe it or not, this knowledge from the senses is actually what motivates Barkley to say that the only thing that exists are mental things, right? That he's going to subscribe to idealism. Now the reason why he goes this route is because he thinks all knowledge is gained from the senses, from empirical observation. If it's not empirical for Barkley, it doesn't exist, right? If I can't know about it, it doesn't exist. Now this is, you might say it's kind of an extreme reaction, but this is in response to a view called rationalism. Now the rationalists thought that there were such things as innate ideas, right? An innate ideas. An innate idea is knowledge that you're born with, or you just have somehow, right? Knowledge that is in your mind either conscious or unconscious from the beginning. You don't acquire knowledge through experience, all right, or at least not all knowledge through experience. There's some knowledge that you're just, and it says born with, you just have it. Well there's a movement against rationalism and there's lots of folks that, I mean so first of all, rationalists disagreed with each other as to what this innate knowledge is and what his conclusions are. That was a huge problem. So out of kind of reaction to that, there came the empiricists. Now the empiricists thought that all knowledge begins and ends with empirical observation. What you see, taste, touch, smell, and hear. That is where your knowledge comes from. And if you can't find your knowledge, if you can't trace that knowledge, any knowledge that you have back to that sensory information, then it doesn't exist. It's not real. So this is, you know, Barkley subscribed to this idea. He was an empiricist through and through. He took it very, very seriously. So he said, look, you know, if these physical objects exist, if there are physical objects, then we can know about the physical objects, right? And if we know about these, if we know physical objects, then we know physical objects through experiences, all right? Now, what's the problem? Well, as Locke has taken great pains to show us, and Barkley does the same thing, so does Descartes before Barkley, so does, you know, Plato points to some problems here too, well, there's a gap between what we get from the senses and the physical objects. In fact, you know, we say, well, you know, there's something underlying these senses, with this sensory information. There's something here, right? That's causing that sensory information. And this is where Barkley steps in and says, look, you say that there's something underlying what happens empirically, but I'm only counting what happens empirically. That, I mean, for me, that's what I can know. That's what's going on. And, you know, the minute you say there's something beyond what's empirical, sounds kind of spooky. Sounds like you're talking about, I don't know, what you're talking about. You don't know what you're talking about, because, you know, you can't describe it. I ask you what it's like, and you can't tell me what it's like, because it's not sensory. You don't have it from the sensory information. You say, well, it's just beneath the color. It's beneath the sound. What is that? So Barkley says, look, we can't know anything beyond what happens with the sensory information. So it's not there. What are you talking about? That's just mysterious stuff. What I can know is what I get from my senses. And my senses tell me there's color and sound and heat and, you know, rough. That's what my senses tell me. So that's what exists. There's none of this physical stuff that you talk about. So it's kind of an extreme view, but it's starting from a place where you might take it pretty seriously, namely, it's starting from the point of empiricism, that the only thing we can know is what's empirical. Now, the rationalists would come in and say that there's this, they're worthy of the substances. Substances, what's beneath the senses, what's beneath the sensory information, but they had different answers as to what substance is. And so Barkley's going to look and say, how do you guys know what substance is? You don't agree on it. You can't give a reasonable count of it. I'm going to go with what makes sense. What makes sense is what my senses tell me. So Barkley's rejection of physical objects, it's a bit extreme, I grant you. But I hope you can understand where he's coming from. Because when you try to give me the nature of this tree here and you tell me, you give me some kind of account of it, anything other than your senses, real fast question that Barkley and others are going to ask you is, well, how do you know what that is? So obviously Russell doesn't accept idealism and probably neither do you. But how do you go about rejecting it? Well, Russell does this in a couple of different ways. First, he points at a real deep problem. Well, what he thinks is a problem for idealism. And he's hinted at this already in chapter two when we talk about the existence of matter. So what is idealism going to say? Well, if idealism is true, then there's all kinds of sensory information that I have. And there's all kinds of things that's happening with this tree behind me. There's lots happening with this tree actually. This tree is engaging in photosynthesis. This tree is absorbing water from the ground. This tree is absorbing nutrients from the ground. This tree is growing ever so slowly in front of my eyes. That's an important point, is this tree is growing. This tree is alive, it has things in it, right? It's got all kinds of microbes on it. I don't know if you can see this too well, but no, you can't see this too well. There's some kind of moss or something growing on the bark of the tree. Now, if idealism is true, all of that is mental. All of what's happening with that tree is mental. Now, well, that's a lot that's happening, right? That's a lot that's happening in that tree. And by the way, it's a lot more than I can keep track of. There's an impossible number of, a really huge number of cells in this tree of which I am not aware. I don't know the number of cells in this tree. And yes, somehow that's happening in my mind. Somehow all of this is happening in here. The causal direction of what's happening in this tree is from my perceptions to the tree. And that seems a little backwards, right? It seems like what should be happening with the perceptions, even given the nature of what a perception is, right? A perception is being affected by something else. That tree, what's happening in that tree should affect my perceptions and not the other way around. So this is the first rebuttal that Russell offers to Barclay. That there's just so much happening. What's going on with this tree? And it can't possibly be happening in my mind. So Russell's given us a strange consequence of idealism. That there's a possible number of things that are happening in these trees and the sky and the clouds and the earth is happening in my mind. This is a mental thing. Now, it's a strange consequence. And one of the ways that Barclay tries to account for is to say, well, yeah, of course, this is a large number of things that are happening. But it's happening in the mind of the divine. So what's the problem? This is a strange consequence, especially if you're not any kind of theist. But you know, Barclay, I'm sorry, Russell himself points out that just because idealism is strange doesn't mean that we could just reject the idea. So what he says is since physical objects are not what the senses tell us, whatever these physical objects are, it's going to be strange. It's going to be different. It's going to be completely unfamiliar because, hey, you don't know. Your knowledge of these physical objects begins with your sense data. And if you've looked at the physical sciences long enough, that's true, right? The physical objects are strange. There's a lot happening with the world around us that is just bizarre sometimes. Okay. So how are we going to actually finally get rid of idealism? How's Russell going to go about doing this? Well, I've given an argument for idealism. It's not exactly Barclays, but it's a start. When you have a deductively valid argument, you can't just reject the conclusion to walk away. It's deductively valid. That means that if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. So if the conclusion must be true, given the truth of the premises, if we say that the conclusion is false, then at least one of the premises must be false. So what you have to do is you have to find a counter example to a premise to show that it's false. Or you change the premise. You say, well, this isn't actually what's happening. Something else is happening. You replace the premise with something else and you avoid the conclusion that follows. So Russell does this in the second case. He looks at the second premise from that argument for Barclays' idealism. So here's Barclays' argument again. And it's a second premise there that he rejects. And the second premise is if one knows physical objects, then one knows physical objects through experience. All right. Well, what Russell points out here is that Barclays pretty much just has one idea of ideas. He just has one notion of ideas. And Russell says that, well, there are two, right? Because of what happens with knowledge. There's two things that happen with knowledge. There's the object that's apprehended by the mind. And this is something he points out. A function of a mind is to grasp objects, to be changed by the world around you. You do have to, your mind has to conform to reality, not the other way around. So there's the object that's apprehended by the mind. And then there's the act of apprehending it. So what's going on? Well, this is the difference between the object and the apprehension. So what's the object? The object is the real thing. So there's this tree behind me over my left shoulder. Now, my mind doesn't grab the object, right? But I do grab color. Sure. Now, the color is produced by a variety of influences. Okay? So we've got the electromagnetic radiation. We've got the atmosphere. We've got what happens when I look at it and it hits my optic nerve and the chemical reaction happens in my brain and everything else that happens back here in the back of my brain. All that's involved in the color. That part's not mental. That part's out in the world. What is mental, what is in my mind, is the actual act of my awareness of having that object of knowledge. That's the awareness of it. So I am looking at some leaves right now. There's the object. There's the color of the leaves. That's the object. And there's my awareness of me mentally apprehending that object. There's my awareness of me apprehending that object. I'm mentally apprehending. There's that awareness of me apprehending that object. That awareness, that's mental. That's what happens here. So again, what Russell's pointing at here is he's really trying to give the credit due to the act of perception that there's the object that I'm perceiving and then there's the awareness of the perception. He's trying to get the causal direction correct. Okay. Now since there's this distinction in what happens with apprehending with an idea. There's this distinction what happens with an idea. There's the object of the idea. There's the act of the awareness of the idea. This leads to a distinction in two kinds of knowledge. There's knowledge by acquaintance and there's knowledge by description. Knowledge by acquaintance is first. And knowledge by acquaintance is really what happens with the sense data. Okay. I am acquainted with my senses. This is immediate. This is right there at the forefront of my consciousness. It's happening right now. That's knowledge by acquaintance. Knowledge by description is something different. Knowledge by description is following some kind of general principle. We have some kind of general principle, some abstract principle that in conjunction with the sense data, we take the general principle, we have the sense data, we can infer this other thing exists. The example he uses in the book, he has never been acquainted. He's never had direct sensory experience of the Emperor of China. But he has heard about the Emperor of China from description. I have never met Queen Elizabeth. I have no sensory input of Queen Elizabeth. I have sensory input from a TV which is shown Queen Elizabeth. Okay. But I've never seen Queen Elizabeth. I've never interacted with Queen Elizabeth. So I don't have knowledge of acquaintance with Queen Elizabeth. However, I have knowledge of description. Using certain general principles, using other knowledge of acquaintance, I infer she exists, for instance. Here's a general principle. For the most part, for the news programs, it's really reliable that if they portray somebody in the news, that person exists. The news has portrayed Queen Elizabeth. So we have the general principle with the knowledge of acquaintance. I have seen Queen Elizabeth be portrayed by the news. So from that, I infer that she exists. That's the knowledge by description. So here's what Russell says. Look, let's look at this premise, too, again. The premise is, if I know physical objects, then I experience physical objects. Now, the problem that Barclay points out is, you know, if you say knowledge by acquaintance with physical objects and I experience physical objects, then, yeah, the problem that Barclay points out follows. And this is where Russell steps in and says, look, you only got one kind of knowledge happening here, but there are two kinds of knowledge. And the conditions should probably be understood as, if I know physical objects by description, then I know physical objects by acquaintance. And that Russell thinks is false, right? He doesn't think that's going to work. What I know by acquaintance is my sensory information. And he wants to say, look, I've got knowledge by acquaintance with sensory information. Using a general principle, I can know by description that physical objects exist. That's what I'll be able to do. Now, the trick is, of course, is to find the right general principle and to know general principles at all. And that'll be the topic of further chapters.