THE VIRTUES OF RUSSELL'S THEORY OF TRUTH

When a person has a predicative belief, that the knife is to the left of the book, for example, what is the person thinking about? What is the attention directed towards? Is it not fairly obvious that the person is thinking about the particulars the belief is about, the knife and the book, and in a different way, perhaps, thinking about the relation that is supposed to relate them?

Although when someone is thinking of a particular, the person is not immediately acquainted with it, according to Russell's original notion of “acquaintance”, the particular is, indeed, the object of thought, despite the fact that there are normally physical, but not cognitive, intermediaries situated between the person and the particular. This view of thinking of a particular is analogous to direct realism about perception, the alternative being indirect realism (representative perception), according to which what is perceived directly is a sense datum or some sort of image, though the nature, location, and existence, of sense data are matters of controversy. Between a person and an object of perception, there are a number of different sorts of intermediaries, such as an image on the retina and an encoded message travelling along the optic nerve, but these are only things in virtue of which perception takes place, not things that are perceived. An intermediary of this sort is an objectum quo as opposed to an objectum quod.