Russell's multiple relation theory of judgment

Russell and Wittgenstein on Logical Form and Judgement: What did Wittgenstein Try that Wouldn't Work?

“…Clues to precisely how Russell proposed to circumvent the wide direction problem, and thus to the nature of the “not very serious” correction undertaken by Russell in response to Wittgenstein's 19 May “refutation”, can be found through closer inspection of some textual evidence and correspondence which we have already briefly discussed. Specifically, the evidence suggests that the mention of a supplemental “premiss” in Wittgenstein's June letter refers to a significance constraint on judgements of more or less the sort identified by Griffin (, p. 144) and Sommerville (). According to Griffin and Sommerville, Wittgenstein's letter addresses Russell's attempt to deploy this significance constraint in order to block the wide direction problem.…”

“…See Griffin (, –6) where the terms ‘wide’ and ‘narrow’ are first explicitly introduced in the scholarship as names for ‘versions’ of the broader ‘direction problem’ initially discussed and debated by Russell, Wittgenstein and Stout. Additional helpful discussion of the direction problem can be found in Pincock (, pp.…”

The Metaphysics of Logical Atomism

“…7 See Griffin [1985] for the history of difficulties for the multiple relation theory, and Wittgenstein's role in it. The difficulties centered around the "order problem", how it is that statements of judgements are only well formed if a well formed proposition is judged, while the multiple relation account seems to allow almost any sequence of objects of various types to be related by the judging relation.…”

Logic as Universal Science

“…Not that I am the first to discover this. The early 'realist' or 'post-idealist ' Russell has been the subject of much first-rate scholarship in recent years: see, e.g., Hylton (1990a), Landini (1998), Makin (2000), Stevens (2005) and such collections of papers as those of Irvine and Wedeking (1993), Monk and Palmer (1996), Griffin (2003) and Griffin and Jacquette (2009). These works are examples of the scholarly interest that has arisen in 'early analytic philosophy'.…”