Russell’s Misunderstanding of the <i>Tractatus</i> on Ordinary Language
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is widely accepted that Russell wrongly took Wittgenstein to be concerned with the conditions required for an ideal language in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Given Russell’s relatively extensive communications with Wittgenstein, this misunderstanding is puzzling. I argue that Russell’s mistake rests on two prior assumptions for which he had some justification. First, communications with Wittgenstein were plausibly interpreted by Russell as confirming, rather than refuting, the belief that Wittgenstein shared with him the view that psychology, epistemology, and logic are interdependent. Second, results from these areas in turn led Russell to the view that ordinary language is irredeemably vague and, as such, in need of replacement with an ideal language. In truth, however, Wittgenstein severed psychology and epistemology from his work and saw vagueness as a surface phenomenon only.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".