   Nevertheless, there a number of aspects of Russell’s philosophical positions that lead to the conclusion that they cohere best with some doctrine about the independence of atomic facts or propositions. Russell did often speak about the constituents of atomic facts as independently existing entities. He writes for example that “each particular has its being independently of any other and does not depend upon anything else for the logical possibility of its existence” (PLA, 203). It is not altogether clear what Russell meant by speaking of particulars or entities as being logically independent. In contemporary parlance, typically, “logical independence” is used solely to speak of a relation between sentences, propositions, or perhaps facts or states of affairs. One possible interpretation would be to take Russell as holding that any atomic fact involving a certain group of particulars is logically independent of an atomic fact involving a distinct group of particulars, even if the two facts involve the same quality or relation (see, e.g., Bell and Demopoulos 1996, 118–19).  This weakened version of the independence thesis even has certain attractions over the stronger principle endorsed by Wittgenstein. Most of the usual counterexamples given against the thesis that atomic facts or propositions are always independent involve simple properties that are thought to be exclusive. Consider, for example, what has come to be called the “color exclusion problem”. The propositions “a is red” and “a is blue” do not seem to be independent from one another: from the truth of one the falsity of the other can seemingly be inferred. However, the weakened version of the independence principle, on which only atomic facts involving different particulars are independent, does not entail that it is possible that “a is red” and “a is blue” may both be true.