The contrasting expressions "knowledge by description" and "knowledge by acquaintance" were promoted by Bertrand Russell, who was extremely critical of the equivocal nature of the word know, and believed that the equivocation arose from a failure to distinguish between the two fundamentally different types of knowledge.
Read more about Knowledge By Description: Grote, Helmholtz, James, Russell
Famous quotes containing the words knowledge and/or description:
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“An intentional object is given by a word or a phrase which gives a description under which.”
—Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (b. 1919)