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In 1910 Russell turned to swim against the tide of European thought. Bolzano, Meinong, Frege, Moore, Russell himself, they had all of them conceived of judgment as a binary relation between a judging subject and what is judged — whether a Satz an sich, an Objektiv, a Gedanke or a proposition. To this way of thinking, Russell opposed his "multiple relation theory of judgment'. According to this theory, talk of propositions is just an eliminable façon de parler: there is no more to a proposition p than the judging of it, an act which consists in the obtaining of a many-termed relation between the judging subject and, intuitively speaking, the diverse constituents ofp. By contrast, his pupil, Wittgenstein, chose to strike out with the tide, insisting that there is no judging p unless there is a proposition p to judge.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137286338_10

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