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Wittgenstein's earliest discussion of belief arises from his objections to Russell's theories of judgement. Initially, Russell had held a dual-relation theory, according to which a belief is a dual relation between something mental — a subject or an act of belief — and a ‘proposition’, an objective entity that exists whether or not it is believed. Tractatus 5.54f. dismisses this theory as violating the extensionalist principle that when one proposition occurs in another one, as according to the dual-relation theory ‘ p ’ does in the proposition ‘ A believes that p ’, it can do so only as the basis of truth-functional operations, which ‘ p ’ does not in ‘ A believes that p ’ (for the truth of the latter is not a function of that of the former) ( see general propositional form ). Both Wittgenstein and Russell also came to reject it for a less dogmatic reason. In (1)  A believes/judges that p what A believes is not an object, a fact. (1) does not presuppose that there is something to be believed; it may be true even if no fact corresponds to ‘ p ’ (NL 95; Problems 72–3). In response to this problem, Russell developed his multiple-relation theory of judgement ( Essays ch. VII; ‘Theory’ 110): Othello's belief that Desdemona loves Cassio is not a dual relation between him and a proposition, but a multiple relation between him and the constituents of the proposition — Desdemona, ... log in or subscribe to read full text