Wittgenstein’s Critique of Russell’s New Theory of Judgment in Philosophical Remarks

Mauro Engelmann

In the 1920s, Russell came to defend a new theory of judgment associated with neutral monism and the causal theory of meaning in a series of works: Analysis of Mind (1921), An Outline of Philosophy (1927) and Analysis of Matter (1927). Wittgenstein discusses Russell’s theory quite systematically in his manuscripts from 1929 and 1930, and

presents a critique of Russell’s views on meaning and judgment in his Philosophical Remarks (1930). I intend to show the nature of Wittgenstein’s critique and what he thought were the implications of Russell’s theory. It will turn out that the new theory, according to

Wittgenstein, implies an infinite regress. Moreover, it allows us to judge a nonsense, which was at least one of the objections (if not the objection) that Wittgenstein developed against Russell’s old theory of judgment in Theory of Knowledge (1913). Before doing this, I prepare

the background of Wittgenstein’s critique by outlining Russell’s philosophy in Analysis of Mind.