 Olson finds that the upshot of Bradley’s arguments was not so much a reductio of relations, but to show that facts should be taken as irreducible entities. The word “relation”, for Olson, is ambiguous between two senses: the first one is to designate an entity that can be multiply instantiated by various pairs of relata, whereas the second sense is to designate the fact of relatedness. In place of “relation”, Olson prefers the word “connection”, since it “can only mean being connected. There is not the same temptation to think of it as an additional thing that does the connecting.  The connection is not a constituent of the fact; it is the fact itself” (Olson 1987: 61).  Armstrong seems to have something similar to this in mind when he says that states of affairs “come first”. But then he also adds that they “hold their constituents together in a non-mereological form of composition, a form of composition that even allows the possibility of having different states of affairs with identical constituents” (Armstrong 1997: 118, italics added).