Judgment

Judgment — The mental act of affirming or denying something about something, joining a subject to a predicate so that the result can be true or false: “The sky is blue”; “Socrates is mortal.” The word derives from the Latin iudicium (from iudex, “judge”) and originally evokes the gesture of discerning and deciding. It is distinguished from the mere apprehension of an isolated concept, which asserts nothing and is therefore neither true nor false; judgment is, classically, the proper locus of truth. In On Interpretation, Aristotle analyzes judgment as apóphansis — the declarative discourse that combines or separates nouns and verbs and is liable to being true or false. In modern philosophy, Kant makes judgment the axis of his theory of knowledge: in the Critique of Pure Reason he distinguishes analytic judgments, in which the predicate is already contained in the concept of the subject (“A bachelor is unmarried”), from synthetic ones, in which the predicate adds new information (“All bodies have weight”); and he crosses this division with the opposition between a priori (independent of experience) and a posteriori (derived from it). The great Kantian question is how synthetic a priori judgments are possible, for they would ground mathematics and physics. Kant also devotes the third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, to the faculty of judgment (Urteilskraft) — the power to think the particular under the universal — examining aesthetic judgment (the beautiful) and teleological judgment (purposiveness in nature). Judgment thus connects with neighboring notions such as proposition, concept, and reasoning.

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