Question 1 (1 point)
What does Bertrand Russell say about our ability to have knowledge of the external
world?
Russell gave up on defining knowledge and retreated to skepticism; he
abandoned philosophy for mathematics in writing, along with Whitehead, the
Principia Mathematica, a work in three volumes on the foundations of
mathematics.
Russell claims that it is irrational to go any distance beyond our immediate
sensory grasp of the external world and make the leap to asserting the existence
of anything beyond the sense-data of subjective experience, so we can have
certainty only about the subjective side of reality. We can never know reality in
itself.
The relation consisting of the mind's acquaintance with something other than
the mind is the mind's main characteristic and is the foundation of our ability to
have knowledge of the external world. We are justified in inferring the existence
of both sides of this relation, and this is the form our knowledge of the external
world takes.
Russell asserts that we can never truly judge that something with which we are
not immediately acquainted in fact exists. Therefore our knowledge of the
external world requires communicating with others about their sense data and
and then comparing their reports with our own sense data.
Russell agrees with Berkeley; what we know is ideas and all ideas are in some
mind or other, so it is simply the mind's ability to have ideas that enables us to
have knowledge in the first place, and it only those ideas that we know in the
external world.