1 Russellian Acquaintance and Frege’s Puzzle DONOVAN WISHON University of Mississippi dwishon@olemiss.edu [penultimate draft – please cite published version] In this paper, I argue that a number of recent Russell interpreters, including Evans, Davidson, Campbell, and Proops, mistakenly attribute to Russell what I call ‘the received view of acquaintance’: the view that acquaintance safeguards us from misidentifying the objects of our acquaintance. I contend that Russell’s discussions of phenomenal continua cases show that he does not accept the received view of acquaintance. I also show that the possibility of misidentifying the objects of acquaintance should be unsurprising given underappreciated aspects of Russell’s overall theory of knowledge and acquaintance. Finally, I consider the radical impact that Russell’s actual views on acquaintance have for our understanding of his well- known George IV case in ‘On Denoting’. In particular, I argue that Russell’s treatment of the George IV case is not a one-size-fits-all solution to Frege’s Puzzle and provides no support for the received view of acquaintance. 1. Introduction Russell’s Theory of Descriptions is at best a partial solution to Frege’s Puzzle. Frege’s Puzzle is the problem of explaining how it is that distinct co- referential expressions (and their analogues in thought) can make different contributions to the cognitive significance of the utterances or thoughts in which they occur. 1 Following Frege, this problem is most often discussed in the context of identity statements: an identity sign flanked by two referring expressions. In these paradigmatic cases, the problem is to explain how thoughts or utterances of the form ‘a = a’ and ‘a = b’ can differ in cognitive significance if ‘a’ and ‘b’ co-refer. In such cases, the first is analytic and a priori while the second need not be. But it is important to keep in mind that similar problems arise whenever we use (rather than mention) distinct expressions (or concepts) whose semantic contributions at the level of reference or denotation is the same and yet whose contributions to cognitive significance differ. For instance, neither ‘Hesperus is visible in the evening 1 In saying here and elsewhere in this paper that linguistic expressions have ‘analogues in thought’, I mean to be neutral on the issue of whether there is a genuine, full-blown ‘language of thought’ as well as on the issue of whether Russell thinks that there is one.