KNOWLEDGE BY ACQUAINTANCE 221 



relation of supposing or judging occurs, the terms to which 

 the supposing or judging mind is related by the relation of 

 supposing or judging must be terms with which the mind in 

 question is acquainted. This is merely to say that we 

 cannot make a judgment or a supposition without know- 

 ing what it is that we are making our judgment or sup- 

 position about. It seems to me that the truth of this 

 principle is evident as soon as the principle is understood ; 

 I shall, therefore, in what follows, assume the principle, 

 and use it as a guide in analysing judgments that contain 

 descriptions. 



Returning now to Julius Caesar, I assume that it will 

 be admitted that he himself is not a constituent of any 

 judgment which I can make. But at this point it is 

 necessary to examine the view that judgments are com- 

 posed of something called "ideas," and that it is the 

 " idea " of Julius Caesar that is a constituent of my 

 judgment. I believe the plausibility of this view rests 

 upon a failure to form a right theory of descriptions. We 

 may mean by my " idea " of Julius Caesar the things that 

 I know about him, e.g. that he conquered Gaul, was 

 assassinated on the Ides of March, and is a plague to 

 schoolboys. Now I am admitting, and indeed contending, 

 that in order to discover what is actually in my mind 

 when I judge about Julius Caesar, we must substitute for 

 the proper name a description made up of some of the 

 things I know about him. (A description which will 

 often serve to express my thought is " the man whose 

 name was Julius Ccesar." For whatever else I may have 

 forgotten about him, it is plain that when I mention him 

 I have not forgotten that that was his name.) But 

 although I think the theory that judgments consist of 

 ideas may have been suggested in some such way, yet I 

 think the theory itself is fundamentally mistaken. The 



