ABSTRACT
The notion of an internal relation has a nefarious past, and an unpromising future, in the minds of some philosophers. Indeed, analytical philosophy might plausibly be said to have been born in the rejection by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore of British Idealism's "Axiom of Internal Relations". Internal relations obtain only among things that play a role in a language and only in virtue of the particular roles that they play. There is a weight of tradition behind the view that internal relations can be expressed only by analytic truths. Internal relations obtain between concepts, because concepts are instruments of language, and it is between or among the instruments of language that internal relations lie. The notion of an internal relation is thus transformed in Ludwig Wittgenstein's work from a kind of metaphysical relation between objects, which determines their identities, to a pragmatic constraint on linguistic understanding and meaning.
