Wittgenstein's criticism of Russell's theory of judgment

THE PUBLICATION FOR the first time in its entirety of what was writ­ ten of Russell's 1913 book, Theory of Knowledge,I throws a flood of light on . m��Y aspe�ts of Ru�sell's philosophy between the completion of Pnnczpw _ a�d his co�verswn to neutral monism, and perhaps even more o . n the ongms of Wmgenstein's logical atomism. The book was to con­ Sist of two large parts (Russell at one time thought there might be two sepa_rate volumes): one concerned with analysis and the other with syn­ thesis. The synthetic part, which was later taken up in Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) and papers such as "The Relation f s _ D t Ph · , ( o ense a a to ys�cs 1914) and "The Ultimate Constituents of Matter" (1915), was mte_nded to show how scientific knowledge (including knowle�ge of logic as wel _ l as �ow ledge of the empirical sciences) could be obtamed �rom the epistemic base presented in the first part of the book. I� was m the first part, the foundation for the whole system, that the �ro)ect came _ to grief, and as a result Russell never wrote the syn­ thetic par�. In �his �a per, I shall be concerned entirely with the nature of Russell s epistemic fo . undations in Theory of Knowledge and the rea­ sons why he came to thmk them unsatisfactory. Russ�ll came �o view the work as unsatisfactory because of criticism �rom Wmgenstem, who was then his student. The criticism is of great Importance for two reasons: firstly, it decisively influenced Russell's