This paper offers an interpretation of Russell's multiple-relation theory of judgment which characterizes it as direct application of the 1905 theory of definite descriptions. The paper maintains that it was by regarding propositional symbols (when occurring as subordinate clauses) as disguised descriptions of complexes, that Russell generated the philosophical explanation of the hierarchy of orders and the ramified theory of types of Principia mathematica (1910). The interpretation provides a new understanding of Russell's abandoned book Theory of knowledge (1913), the ‘direction problems’ and Wittgenstein's criticisms.