In his critical notice of Russell's Theory of Knowledge, R. E. Tully takes issue with my interpretation of Wittgenstein's criticism of Russell's theory of judgment. Against it he raises two objections and also sketches an alternative interpretation. On Tully's characterization, I believe that Russell was shot out of the tree by a subtle but devastating argument, while Tully believes that he was shaken out of the tree by a much broader but non-lethal attack on his conception of a proposition. The (...) metaphor is not inappropriate. I certainly believe that Wittgenstein's attack was lethal to Russell's theory of judgment and shows extraordinary marksmanship. But I do not want to deny that there was a lot of tree shaking going on at the same time—concerning, in particular, the logical constants and the concept of a proposition, both of which were topics closely related to the theory of judgment. Thus, while I maintain that Russell was shot, I do not subscribe to a single-bullet theory. (shrink)

One of the main challenges faced by Russell's theory of judgement was to provide a satisfactory account of judgement that was not committed to the existence of true, false, or non-existent complex entities such as Meinongian objectives. In the study of the Russell-Wittgenstein debate on that theory, scholars never considered the idea that Wittgenstein might not have followed Russell on that issue. In this article. I address that question and hold, first, that problems raised by Russell's theory of judgement find (...) their solution in the picture theory. Then, I show that Wittgenstein hesitated for a long period of time in theNotebooksbetween a version of his solution which is committed to the existence of possible (non-existing) complex entities and one which is not. Finally, I argue that he did, along with Meinong, go for a committing version in theTractatus. (shrink)

In 1913 Wittgenstein raised an objection to Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment that eventually led Russell to abandon his theory. As he put it in the Tractatus, the objection was that “the correct explanation of the form of the proposition, ‘A makes the judgement p’, must show that it is impossible for a judgement to be a piece of nonsense. (Russell’s theory does not satisfy this requirement,” (5.5422). This objection has been widely interpreted to concern type restrictions on the (...) constituents of judgment. I argue that this interpretation is mistaken and that Wittgenstein’s objection is in fact a form of the problem of the unity of the proposition. (shrink)