JUDGMENT. – Judgment (Gr. ἀπόφασις, κατάφασις, Lat. iudicium, propositio, enunciatio, sententia) is the act by which thought affirms (or denies) something. The Latin term, in its immediate reference, belongs to juridical language. Ius dicere (Gr. δικάζειν, κρίνειν) meant “to exercise jurisdictional activity,” and iudicium was this activity itself, as well as the trial or discussion of the case: “dedicere causam aliquam in iudicium” (Cicero, De opt. gen. orat., 7, 18). Classical Latin, however, also frequently uses the term in the sense of “opinion,” “view” (id., Tuscul., I, 1), and, more rarely, in the sense of “sentence”: “vos multis iam iudiciis iudicatis” (id., IV Cat., 3, 5). The logical reference of the term (which became common in modern languages after J. C. Wolff) is connected with this latter meaning: judgment indeed indicates, in the logical-gnoseological sense, the decision, through affirmation, and the pronouncement of thought concerning the contents of knowledge. Understood in this way, judgment is the fundamental process of thought in act and the highest noetic function of subjectivity and of the ego, which through it commits itself and takes a position before being (existence, essence, phenomena, becoming), thus positing, within the sphere of consciousness, the formal value of truth.
The logical interpretation of the structure of judgment and the determination of its gnoseological-metaphysical meaning are consequently related to the very conceptions of thought and reality. If reality is understood as positivity existing in itself, beyond the sphere of knowledge, then judgment universally assumes the meaning of recognition of the existence, nature, and relations that are constituted either within individual beings, in accordance with their ontic density, or among the multiplicity of beings, in accordance with their empirical-metaphysical interdependence. If, on the other hand, reality (or part of it) is understood as a position of consciousness, then judgment assumes the opposite meaning, as the process through which reality is constructed by organizing itself in the forms of spirit.
In Aristotle, judgment is the act of the mind “that affirms something of something”: κατάφασις δὲ ἐστιν ἀπόφασις τινος κατὰ τινος (Perih., 6, 17 a 25; cf. Anal. pr., I, 1, 24 a 16-17). Judgment is therefore a synthesis, σύνθησις τις νοημάτων (De anima, III, 6, 430 a 27-28), but its terms, subject and predicate, both have an ontological derivation: the proposition is true or false insofar as the composition of the mind, in its duality of affirmation and negation, agrees or does not agree with reality in itself (Perih., loc. cit.). For this reason Aristotle himself already noted that judgment, although in its logical structure it is a synthesis, may also be considered a division (Ἐνδέχεται δὲ καὶ διαίρεσιν φάναι πάντα: De anima, loc. cit., 430 b 34), insofar as the predicate, as a determination in act, arises from a process of segregation performed by the mind within the real unity of the subject. S. Tommaso, while noting, with Aristotle (cf. De anima, loc. cit.), the subjective character of judgment (as composition it is formally in the intellect and not, in itself, in reality), nevertheless reaffirms its requirement of conformity to reality itself: “when it is conformed to that which is outside, in the thing, it is said that the judgment is true. The intellect, however, judges concerning an apprehended thing when it says that something is or is not, which is the act of the intellect composing and dividing” (De verit., q. 1, a. 3, c.; cf. particularly Sum. theol., 1°, q. 85, a. 5, where it is specified in what sense the conformity of mental synthesis with reality must be understood). In the thought of S. Tommaso, judgment, although it is what intelligence most properly possesses in the function of knowing (“when it begins to judge concerning an apprehended thing, then the very judgment of the intellect is something proper to it, which is not found outside in the thing”: De verit., loc. cit.) and constitutes the summit of its activity, nevertheless presents itself as an interpretation and expression of the real in an active process of differentiation and relationalization thereof: “Hence the intellect knows many things by composing and dividing, just as it knows the difference and comparison of things” (Sum. Theol., loc. cit., ad 1).
In modern philosophy, while empiricism absorbs judgment into the purely perceptive and comparative process of intuitions and representations (for Locke, judgment is “the union or separation of representations”: Essay, IV, chap. 5, § 2 ff.; for Helvétius, “juger est sentir”: De l’esprit, I, 25), rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche) initiates the process of interiorizing judgment, not only as a function but also with regard to its very content, toward the roots of consciousness. For Kant, judgment in general “is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained in the universal” (Critica del g., introd., IV; Italian trans. by A. Gargiulo, reprint, Bari 1928, p. 17). It lies at the center of cognitive activity as the act through which the manifold of representations is taken up into categorical synthesis. Through judgment, the process of unifying the matter of knowledge in the unity of consciousness is accomplished. But since the universal forms both of sensibility (space and time) and of the intellect (the categories) have a transcendental derivation, synthesis, throughout the entire domain of universal and necessary knowledge, is a priori, insofar as the predicate under which the subject is subsumed is not drawn from experience and therefore from the intuition of the subject itself (phenomenon), but precedes it as the condition of the very possibility of experience (cf. Critica della ragion pura, introd., II, IV-V; I, II, entire). The Kantian a priori synthesis was an affirmation of the originality and autonomy of consciousness at the most delicate moment of its cognitive functions. This autonomy is wholly without limits in absolute idealism, in which judgment, as a process of determining and organizing the concept, is at the same time a process of determining and positing reality: synthesis here constitutes the very creativity of the contents of consciousness and therefore of the real. Hegel rejects as “extremely superficial” (Scienza della logica, sec. 1°, chap. 2; Italian trans. by A. Moni, III, Bari 1925, p. 77) the definition of judgment as “union between two concepts.” Judgment is instead “the determination of the concept posited in the concept itself” (loc. cit., p. 71), or “the concept’s determining itself for itself” (ibid.), “the first realization of the concept” (ibid.). It implies subject and predicate, but “the subject as such is at first merely a sort of name, since what it is is expressed only by the predicate, which contains being in the sense of the concept” (loc. cit., p. 73): it is therefore through judgment that the concept is constructed; judgment is “the concept’s dividing itself through its own activity” (loc. cit., p. 74; cf. Enc., §§ 166-80). In the Hegelian conception, the assertoric process of human thought through the three dialectical moments of affirming, denying, and reaffirming is the very movement by which the reality of the idea determines itself (and hence posits itself) from within its spiritual energy. This conception of judgment is taken up in Italian idealism: judgment, “understood as logical judgment, is neither prius nor posterius with respect to the concept, because it is the concept itself in its actuality” (B. Croce, Logica, sec. 2°, I, 6th ed., Bari 1942, p. 73); judgment “is thought insofar as it is the synthesis of the two terms [subject and predicate] whereby being mediates itself in its identity with itself” (G. Gentile, Sistema di logica, I, part 2°, chap. 4, 3rd ed., Florence 1940, p. 226): subject and predicate are ultimately, in actualism, the identical reality of being (in thought), which as subject is the “indeterminate term,” and as predicate the “determining term” (loc. cit., p. 227).
In seeking to define the essential lines of a conception of judgment that responds to the demands of realism, it is appropriate to distinguish three aspects: the logical, the epistemological-metaphysical, and the psychological.
1) From the logical point of view, traditional philosophy has generally regarded judgment as “a relation of belonging or exclusion between two terms (ideas, concepts): subject and predicate”; the constitutive form of the relation was indicated by the verb to be (in the sense of affirmation and negation), which Aristotle already declared essential to any human discourse that intends to assert something (Perih., 5). The classical logic’s interpretation of the structure of judgment in general by the formula S is P aimed at a simplified and unitary reduction of II. This reduction presents the drawbacks proper to every simplification, insofar as judgment, in the concrete unfolding of human discourse, assumes different structures that cannot universally be expressed by that formula. Such, for example, are judgments of action (“the sun shines,” which cannot be identified with “the sun is shining”); judgments of relation (“heat causes bodies to expand”); judgments of existence (“there are difficulties”); and impersonal judgments (“it is cold,” “it is of no use to grieve over fortune”). In this last class of judgments, there is in reality no true subject, and judgment appears as the simple affirmation of a content (predicate): it may refer either to the mere observation of the presence and existence of empirical facts or to the affirmation of values of an intellectual-rational order: necessity, impossibility, probability, appropriateness, obligation, and so forth. The formula S is P, on the other hand, is adequate for judgments of inherence (“man is mortal”), in which a subject, through the decomposition and hence attribution of its predicates, is determined in its essential or possible relations. For this entire class of judgments, the logical interpretation that best expresses their structure is not that which sees the S-P relation in extension (the subject is included in the class of the predicate—in the class of mortal things there is man), but rather, as Stuart Mill correctly demonstrated against Hamilton (Examination, 22; Logic, I, 5, § 3), in intension (the content of the predicate belongs to the subject—mortality belongs to man). This interpretation, also called the theory of belonging, inherence, or inexistence, which is already predominant in Aristotle, contains within itself the more general formula of connection (the predicate is with the subject). Other formal definitions that characterize judgment as the association, composition, or synthesis of ideas (quite apart from the inadequacy of the term “idea” to express the contents of judgment, which sometimes belong to the concreteness of sense intuition) do not indicate its essential feature, since they fail to express the belonging of the predicate to the subject as its own determination and therefore the unity (in an essential or accidental sense) of that predicate with the subject.
As for the logical distinctions of judgment, which are proposition (v.), it should be noted that the division of judgment into affirmative and negative refers solely to the content and not to the form of the assertive act. Judgment, in fact, as a mental act, is always affirmation, even when it expresses the nonexistence of a content or the nonbelonging of a predicate to a subject. A negative judgment, moreover, always functions in relation to an affirmative one: with respect to a given subject, one does not deny all predicates that do not belong to it (predication would be open to infinity), but only those that have been, or are thought to be, capable of being or intended to be improperly attributed to II.
2) From the epistemological-metaphysical point of view, judgment involves the most delicate problems, both on the side of its content and on that of its form. The content (the predicate and, in the class of attribution judgments, the subject) first raises the problem of its derivation into the actuality of the mental synthesis and, consequently, of its ontological consistency. An analysis of the process by which human knowledge is constructed shows, first of all, that the contents of consciousness concerning which a judgment of existence can be formulated are given either in sense intuition or in the perception that thought has of itself and of its own acts. But since the principle both of sensation and of thought cannot be understood as pure passivity, it follows that the problem of the possibility of a priori elements in the synthesis of judgment is generally justified—and particularly so for those judgments that seem to be additions to the pure empirical datum: universal and necessary judgments, judgments of value. Nevertheless, although thought (as also sensibility) cannot be denied a transcendental structure, this should not be understood in the Kantian sense of a noetic determination prior to every experience. Concepts and categories, even as they move in the direction of the transcendental actuality of thought, arise within experience as intentional determinations of its real contents. This is the fundamental meaning of judgment in Thomism, in which the entire construction of knowledge (the system of judgments) is not a movement of consciousness toward the positing of objects, but the assumption of real objectivity into the intentionality of consciousness. The a priori of thought is, in Thomism, its very expressive power of the a posteriori, its capacity for conceptualizing and affirming, in the direction of being, the real contents given in sense-intellectual intuition, and its power to determine their structure, properties, and relations.
The synthesis of subject and predicate implies on the part of thought a noetic division within the objects of knowledge. The meaning of this division, and at the same time its reason for being, was already related by St. Thomas to the analytical structure of human intelligence: “... intellectus humanus non statim in prima apprehensione capit perfectam rei cognitionem; sed primo apprehendit aliquid de ipsa, puta quidditatem ipsius rei...; et deinde intelligit proprietates et accidentia et habitudines circumstantes rei essentiam. Et secundum hoc necesse habet unum apprehensum alii componere et dividere, et ex una compositione et divisione ad aliam procedere” (Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 85, a. 5, c.). In reality, before presenting itself as a synthesis, judgment entails a process of analysis. It is not an artificial composition of concepts, but rather a segregation and an individualization by which thought operates, within the unity of the subject (of the datum), upon elements, properties, and relations. Judgment decomposes, diffracts, and divides the empirical datum or the concept into a multiplicity of categories, bringing its individual values to the fore under the impulse of practical or theoretical ends, and recomposing them with the subject in the assertive act. Judgment therefore functions in relation to our limited cognitive powers; in itself and through the discourse that expresses it, it entails the extension of our knowledge through time and, in this sense, its fragmentary character. At the same time, however, it is an expression of the activity and initiative of the spirit, which analyzes the object and apprehends it in its internal structure, organizing it into a system of values and relations. In this way being is articulated, through the dynamism of thought, into the organic unity of knowledge, science, and philosophy. In a realistic sense, Hegel’s assertion is true: judgment is the very determination of the concept, and therefore of reality.
The value of judgment as the autonomy and spontaneity of thought is revealed particularly in its essential and formal moment, affirmation. The deepest significance of judgment as affirmation and assent is the overcoming of the passivity of consciousness and its positivity as the principle of apperception, reflection, and universality. Through assent, consciousness in a certain way arrests the purely perceptual course of its activity and, taking up its contents in the awareness of affirmation (the term, from ad-firmare, aptly expresses the determination and stability that contents assume in judgment; cf. the English statement), transposes them onto the plane of value, of being (in the most comprehensive sense of the term), and therefore of the absolute. Even where the expression of affirmation by means of the verb to be is absent or nonessential (as in not a few languages, and in the impersonal and action judgments of other languages), affirmation itself remains the most vital moment of the act, since every pronouncement of thought, by virtue of the reflexive principle that determines it, entails at the same time the implicit assertion: “so it is.” “Man thinks,” insofar as it is a true judgment expressed by thought, also means “it is true that man thinks.” The universal value of being thus shows itself to be immanent in the very essential form of thought, whereby judgment is among the moments most revealing of the meaning of human knowledge. The ennobling of the term in current speech (“to have judgment” = to think and act well) underscores, in its own way, the value of positivity inherent in judgment as such: a value that persists, as regards form, even when, in a false judgment, the content—that is, the relation expressed by the proposition—has no correspondence in reality.
3) Assent (adherence, recognition, acceptance, consent) is a moment that goes beyond the pure cognitive act as apprehension or perception. Although this implies, in the very structure of intellectual consciousness, a heterogeneity of functions, it does not entail attributing assent to the will, as maintained by Cartesio (Med., IV; Princ. philos., I, 32). Assent must instead be referred to consciousness’s own power to become aware of its object and express it to itself within the domain of reflection: it is the completion of the cognitive act, the sanction and the word spoken by the spirit concerning what is (cf. Sum. Theol., 1a-2ae, q. 17, a. 6).
Nevertheless, from the psychological point of view, the will and all the other conditions of personality are not absent from the assertive process, and above all from its analytical moment. Indeed, in the individual situations occurring in the temporal course of individual thought, the choice of the predicate among the possible judgments concerning the contents offered by reality, and hence the determination of the subject in one direction rather than another among its predicates, is always related to the formation, culture, environment, aims, and interests that direct, as substratum and biological impetus, the course of consciousness itself. Here lies the principal reason for the extent and variety of judgments that the social world of man entails in all its manifestations. From this point of view, judgment is the clearest expression of the contingency and historicity of human thought, in the individual and temporal situation in which the universality of the spirit is realized.
The force of affirmation or assent presents different degrees, according to the clarity of intellectual perception and the sum of interests that the various contents possess for the subject. Yet even when assent is complete, it must not, in itself alone, be understood as an argument for the truth of the judgment. Assent follows intellectual perception; but this, while presenting itself primarily as a relation of objectivity and universality, also consists in the individual concreteness of the human being and therefore stands, as has been said, in a relation of mutual action and reaction with the will and the other elements composing the structure of the person: “Plura - avvertiva già Cicerone - multo homines iudicant odio aut amore aut cupiditate aut iracundia aut dolore aut laetitia aut spe aut timore aut errore aut aliqua permotione mentis quam veritate aut praescripto aut iuris norma aliqua aut iudicii formula aut legibus” (De orat., 2, 42). It is not possible here to analyze the relations of interdependence between human judgment, in its origin and dialectical movement, and the ontological-psychic totality of the personal synthesis. From this perspective, judgment—which, it must be noted, as an essential function of thought universally accompanies and directs the process of ideation—draws upon the deepest roots of the human being and is, for this reason, situated at the boundaries of moral responsibility and freedom.