Judgment

In the Theaetetus and the Sophist, Plato provides the first philosophical analysis of judgment. Thinking, he suggests, is the soul's conversation with itself, and judgment is the conclusion of that conversation: the moment when the soul "says within itself that something is so." A considerable part of the discussion in these dialogues is devoted to the problem of false judgment, a problem which bears directly on the nature of judgment as such. If I judge that something is, it may seem that I must think of what is (and so judge truly) or think of nothing at all (and so fail to judge). The Sophist resolves this difficulty by distinguishing between being and non-being in a way that allows for meaningful falsehood. A false statement weaves together concepts that do not in fact belong together. The problem of false judgment thus reveals that judgment is not simple perception or mere opinion but an active interweaving of concepts, a composition that can succeed or fail in corresponding to reality. The relation between judgment and knowledge, and between opinion and truth, is treated more fully under the ideas of Knowledge and Truth.

Plato's analysis of judgment as an interweaving of concepts provides the framework that Aristotle will formalize into the logic of predication, where truth and falsity belong to the proposition, the composition or division of terms, rather than to simple apprehension.

Aristotle establishes the analysis of judgment in terms of the proposition, which becomes the basis of Western logic. "Falsity and truth," he writes, "have to do with combination and separation." A name or concept by itself is neither true nor false; truth and falsity arise only in the proposition, when the mind combines or separates concepts. "Every proposition expresses either that something belongs to something or that something does not belong to something." Aristotle distinguishes the proposition from other forms of sentence: a prayer is a sentence, but is neither true nor false, and its investigation "belongs rather to the study of rhetoric or of poetry."

Aristotle classifies simple propositions by quantity (universal or particular), by quality (affirmative or negative), and by their relations of opposition. Two propositions are contradictory if they are opposite in both quality and quantity; two universal propositions are contrary if one is affirmative and the other negative. These formal relationships, discussed more fully under the idea of Opposition, determine the structure of inference. In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle further distinguishes between propositions that are self-evident, the axioms or first principles known by intuitive induction (discussed under the idea of Induction), and those that require demonstration.

The copula "is" is, in the Aristotelian logic, the sign of predication; it also signifies an affirmation of the unity of subject and predicate. All the terms of discourse can be classified according to their character as subjects and predicates, and propositions can be classified by reference to the type of subject-term and predicate-term which comprise them. The formal structure not only of the proposition but also of the syllogism, treated under the idea of Reasoning, is determined by this order of subjects and predicates.

Aristotle's logic of predication provides the framework within which Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant all develop their theories of judgment, though Kant will depart from the Aristotelian classification in several important respects.

According to Aquinas, judgment is the second of the three acts of a single cognitive faculty variously called "mind" or "intellect" or "reason." This faculty, he writes, "first apprehends something about a thing, such as its essence, and this is its first and proper object; and then it understands the properties, accidents, and various dispositions affecting the essence. Thus it necessarily relates one thing with another by composition or division; and from one composition and division it necessarily proceeds to another, and this is reasoning." The first act of the mind is conception, the simple apprehension of the essence and properties of a thing. Judgment, the second act, unites or separates concepts by affirming or denying one of another. Reasoning, the third act, is the process of going from judgment to judgment.

The act of judgment is, for Aquinas, the act of the mind in which truth or falsity resides. "Truth," he writes, "resides in the intellect composing and dividing"; for when the intellect "judges that a thing corresponds to the form which it apprehends about that thing, then it first knows and expresses truth." Concepts, taken by themselves, are neither true nor false; whatever truth there is implicitly in concepts must be made explicit in judgments. The relation between truth and judgment is treated more fully under the idea of Truth.

Aquinas also distinguishes speculative judgment, which concerns what is the case, from practical judgment, which concerns what ought to be done. Practical judgment terminates in a decision, the judgment of choice, which connects the theory of judgment to the theory of action discussed under the ideas of Prudence and Will. Conscience, on Aquinas's view, is a particular act of practical judgment, applying general moral principles to specific cases.

Aquinas's threefold division of mental acts into conception, judgment, and reasoning bears a resemblance, though perhaps only a verbal one, to Kant's later division of the cognitive faculties into understanding, judgment, and reason. Descartes, while retaining the Thomistic framework in which judgment is the locus of truth and error, will introduce the question of how the will is involved in the act of assent.

Descartes introduces into the theory of judgment a distinction between the proposition and the judgment which has bearing on the problem of error. The proposition is that which may be either asserted or denied; the mind may also, as Descartes stresses, suspend judgment and merely entertain the proposition, declining to judge it true or false. Judgment, on this view, is the act of the will by which the mind assents to or dissents from a proposition. The intellect perceives ideas; the will affirms or denies them. Error arises "from this cause alone, that the will is of wider range than the understanding, and that I do not restrain it within the same limits."

The remedy Descartes proposes follows from this analysis: if I attend carefully to what I perceive and withhold judgment wherever I find obscurity, I cannot err. The rule of clarity and distinctness, which requires that one never assent to what is not clearly and distinctly perceived, shifts responsibility for error from intellectual deficiency to volitional impatience. The Fourth Meditation works this out in detail, arguing that God is not the author of our errors because he gave us the power to withhold assent. The relation between will and understanding in the act of judgment is discussed under the ideas of Mind and Will.

Descartes's analysis makes judgment an act of freedom rather than a mere operation of the intellect. This has consequences for the classification of judgments as well. His emphasis on the distinction between what the mind clearly perceives and what it merely entertains prepares the way for Locke's separation of knowledge from probable judgment and for Hume's account of belief as a sentiment rather than an act of reason.

Descartes's voluntarist account of judgment represents a departure from the Aristotelian and Thomistic analysis, in which judgment is an act of the intellect alone. Locke will take up the idea that judgment involves assent in the absence of full evidence, treating it as the faculty by which the mind operates in the sphere of probability rather than certainty.

Locke distinguishes between two faculties of the mind conversant about truth and falsehood: the faculty of knowing and the faculty of judging. Knowledge, strictly understood, is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas. "The faculty which God has given man to supply the want of clear and certain knowledge, in cases where that cannot be had, is judgment: whereby the mind takes its ideas to agree and disagree, or, which is the same, any proposition to be true or false, without perceiving a demonstrative evidence in the proofs." The way in which Locke distinguishes between knowing and judging, and the fact that he relates this distinction to the difference between certainty and probability, suggests a parallel with the distinction between knowledge and opinion treated under the ideas of Knowledge and Opinion.

Judgment is, on Locke's view, guided by probability, the appearance of agreement based on evidence and testimony that falls short of demonstration. This does not make judgment irrational; it makes it the faculty appropriate to the circumstances in which most of our mental life is conducted. Locke grades the degrees of assent from confident belief to mere conjecture, depending on the quality and quantity of supporting evidence. His distinction between "trifling" and "instructive" propositions is also relevant: trifling propositions, such as "body is body," are universal propositions that "add no light to our understanding; bring no increase to our knowledge." Instructive propositions, by contrast, tell us something about the world that could not be known from the definition of the terms alone.

Locke's doubts about the certainty of inductive generalizations in physics lead him to question whether natural philosophy can ever become a science in the strict sense. A person "accustomed to rational and regular experiments shall be able to see further into the nature of bodies and guess righter at their yet unknown properties," but this, Locke observes, "is but judgment and opinion, not knowledge and certainty."

Locke's separation of judgment from knowledge leaves open the question of what grounds probable judgment beyond the habit of the mind. Hume will press this question by arguing that causal reasoning, on which all judgment about matters of fact depends, is itself a product of custom rather than of reason in the strict sense.

Hume carries the empiricist analysis of judgment to its furthest point. Judgment about matters of fact is, on his view, an expression of belief, and belief is "nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain." When I judge that fire will burn, I do not deduce this from first principles; past experience has conjoined the sight of fire with the feeling of pain, and custom has made the transition from one idea to the other automatic. The principle which determines the mind to form such a judgment is, according to Hume, "Custom or Habit," and precisely because judgment about matters of fact is an effect of custom rather than of reasoning in the strict sense, the strength of the judgment varies with the number and similarity of the cases on which it is based.

Reason, left to itself, can establish the relations of ideas (as in mathematics and logic) but cannot establish any matter of fact beyond present experience and memory. All causal judgments, and therefore all judgments about what has not yet been observed, rest on habit. This is not, in Hume's view, a deficiency to be corrected but the natural operation of the mind. Nature has not left so important a matter as survival to the slow and uncertain operations of abstract reasoning. The relation between Hume's account of causal judgment and the broader problem of induction is discussed under the idea of Induction.

Hume also tends, along with Locke and certain other writers, to construct the unit of knowledge as a relation between ideas or concepts, rather than strictly in the subject-predicate form of the Aristotelian tradition. This tendency, discussed under the idea of Logic, intimates but does not fully develop an alternative to the logic of predication.

Hume's naturalization of judgment creates the problem to which Kant's critical philosophy is addressed. If judgment about matters of fact is merely habitual, the universality and necessity that seem to characterize scientific knowledge require a new explanation, one that Kant will provide by making the forms of judgment the forms of experience itself.

Kant, perhaps more than any other thinker, makes judgment, both as a faculty and as an act, one of the central terms in his philosophy. Along with understanding and reason, judgment is one of the three faculties of cognition. "Judgment in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal." Kant divides this faculty into two forms: determinant judgment, which applies a given universal to a particular case, and reflective judgment, which seeks the universal for a given particular, as when we judge something beautiful or purposive without having a rule in advance.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant departs from the Aristotelian classification of judgments in several respects. Under the head of quantity, he adds the singular proposition to Aristotle's particular and universal. Under the head of quality, he adds the infinite judgment, which affirms a negative predicate of a subject (e.g., "The soul is non-mortal"). Under the head of relation, he distinguishes categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive judgments. And under the head of modality, he makes a threefold division into problematical (what may be), assertoric (what is), and apodictic (what must be). Most importantly, Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, discussed under the idea of Knowledge, corresponds to Locke's distinction between "trifling" and "instructive" propositions: an analytic judgment "expresses nothing in the predicate but what has already been actually thought in the concept of the subject," whereas a synthetic judgment adds something to the subject that could not be known from its definition alone.

It is in the Critique of Judgment that the faculty of judgment receives its fullest treatment. This critique serves to connect the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, for "the Judgement, in the order of our cognitive faculties, forms a mediating link between Understanding and Reason." The aesthetic judgment of beauty and the teleological judgment of purposiveness in nature are treated as exercises of reflective judgment, in which the mind searches for order without having a determinate concept in advance.

Kant's theory of the faculties of understanding, judgment, and reason is so complex a doctrine that it cannot be readily compared with Aquinas's division of mental acts into conception, judgment, and reasoning. Hegel will press against the stability of Kant's distinction between determinant and reflective judgment, arguing that every act of subsumption already transforms the universal it employs.

Hegel's treatment of judgment differs from the Aristotelian and Kantian analyses in that it refuses to treat the proposition as a static form. Judgment (Urteil, which Hegel etymologizes as "original division") is, in his view, the Concept's own self-differentiation. The subject of a judgment is not an inert logical peg but a concrete universal that determines itself by positing the predicate as one of its own moments. On this view, the proposition "The rose is red" is not the external attribution of a property to a thing but the concept "rose" particularizing itself.

Hegel classifies judgments into four ascending types: judgments of existence, of reflection, of necessity, and of the Concept. Each type, in his analysis, sublates the previous one. Judgments of existence ("this is red") are abstract and contingent. Judgments of necessity ("the rose is a plant") express essential connections. Judgments of the Concept ("this action is good") involve an assessment of whether the particular fulfills its own concept. This progression mirrors the dialectical movement of thought from immediacy through mediation to concrete universality. For Hegel, the traditional logic of judgment is not wrong but incomplete; it captures moments that belong to a living process. The distinction between propositions and judgments, which other writers treat as a difference between verbal expression and mental act, becomes in Hegel's thought a difference between static form and dynamic content.

The bearing of this analysis on the controversy over the scope of formal logic, discussed under the idea of Logic, is considerable. For writers like Aristotle, the formal structure of the proposition determines the formal structure of inference. For Hegel, the proposition is only an abstraction from the living movement of thought, and a logic that confines itself to propositions misses the essential nature of judgment.

Hegel's dynamic treatment of judgment has influenced later thinkers who insist that judgment is an active, purposive operation rather than a passive combination of concepts. James, though proceeding from very different philosophical premises, shares with Hegel the conviction that the act of judging involves selection and purpose, not merely the mirroring of given facts.

James approaches the theory of judgment from a psychological and naturalistic standpoint rather than from the formal-logical tradition. Judgment, on his view, is an act of attention and selection. The mind does not passively receive impressions and combine them; it actively picks out features of the flux of experience, holds them steady, and predicates something of them. This selectivity is driven by interest and purpose. "The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest." Two people confronting the same situation may judge it differently because they attend to different aspects of it.

James is sympathetic to Hume's observation that belief is more a matter of sentiment than of reasoning, but he extends the analysis. The feeling of belief, the sense that something is real, is itself a selective response of the organism. We believe in whatever we attend to with sufficient vividness and practical engagement. In the chapter on reasoning in the Principles of Psychology, James argues that the genius of rational thought lies in the ability to single out the right predicate, what he calls the "essential attribute," from the indefinitely many properties a thing possesses. Good judgment, on this view, is a trained capacity to notice what matters, a point that connects the theory of judgment to the practical wisdom discussed under the idea of Prudence.

The bearing of James's naturalistic account on the formal theory of judgment is that it treats the proposition, not as a self-contained logical unit, but as the expression of a purposive act of the mind. This emphasis on the active, interested character of judgment is shared, from a different philosophical direction, with Hegel's insistence that judgment is a living process rather than a static form.

James's insistence that judgment is selective and interest-driven raises a question which the tradition has not resolved: if what we attend to is shaped by our purposes, what distinguishes sound judgment from the habitual confirmation of what we already expect to find? The question of whether judgment is ultimately a matter of reason, of will, or of habit remains one on which the thinkers considered in this chapter disagree.