JUDGMENT. — Judgment (Gr. ἀπόφασις, κατάφασις, iudicium, propositio, enunciatio, sententia) is the act by which thought affirms (or denies) something. The Latin term, in its immediate reference, belongs to legal language. *Ius dicere* (Gr. δικαίωμα, νέω) meant “to exercise judicial activity,” and *iudicium* was both this activity and the trial or discussion of a case: *“deducere causam salialiam in iudicium”* (Cicero, *De opt. gen. orat.*, 7, 18). However, classical Latin usage also includes the term in the sense of “opinion,” “view” (id., *Tuscul.*, I, 1) and, more rarely, in the sense of “sentence”: *“vos multis iam iudiciis iudicastis”* (id., *IV Cat.*, 3, 5). The logical reference of the term (which became common in modern languages after J. C. Wolff) is connected to this last meaning: judgment, in a logical-epistemological sense, denotes the decision through affirmation and the pronouncement of thought regarding the contents of knowledge. Thus understood, judgment is the fundamental process of thought in act and the highest noetic function of subjectivity and the ego, which, through it, engages and takes a stance toward being (existence, essence, phenomena, becoming) and thereby posits, within the sphere of consciousness, the formal value of truth.
The logical interpretation of the structure of judgment and the determination of its epistemological-metaphysical significance are, consequently, related to the very conceptions of thought and reality. If reality is understood as positivity in itself, beyond the sphere of knowing, then judgment universally assumes the meaning of recognition of existence, nature, and relationships that are constituted either within individual beings in function of their ontic density or among the multiplicity of beings in function of their empirical-metaphysical interdependence. If, instead, reality (or part of it) is understood as a positing of consciousness, then judgment assumes the opposite meaning, as the process by which reality is constructed, organizing itself in the forms of spirit.
In Aristotle, judgment is the act of the mind “that affirms something of something”: *καταφασις δὲ ἐστιν ἀπόφασις τινός κατά τινός* (*Perih.*, 6, 17 a 25; cf. *Anal. pr.*, I, 24 a 16-17). Judgment is therefore a synthesis, *συνδυασμός του γνώματος* (*De anima*, III, 6, 430 a 27-28), but its terms, subject and predicate, both have ontological derivation: the proposition is true or false insofar as the mind’s composition, in its bivalence of affirmation and negation, agrees or does not agree with reality in itself (*Perih.*, loc. cit.). For this reason, Aristotle himself already noted that, although in its logical structure judgment is a synthesis, it can also be considered a division (*Ἐνδείξεται δὲ κατὰ διαλέξεις φάναι πάντα*: *De anima*, loc. cit., 430 b 34), insofar as the predicate, as an actual determination, arises from a process of segregation performed by the mind within the real unity of the subject. St. Thomas, while noting, with Aristotle (*cf. De anima*, loc. cit.), the subjective belonging of judgment (as composition, it is formally in the intellect and not, per se, in reality), nevertheless reaffirms its demand for adequation to reality itself: *“when it is adequate to what is outside in reality, it is called true judgment. The intellect judges about an apprehended thing when it says that something is or is not, which is the intellect’s composing and dividing”* (*De verit.*, q. 1, a. 3, c.; cf. particularly *Sum. theol.*, 1a, q. 85, a. 5, where it is specified in what sense the conformity of mental synthesis with reality should be understood). In the thought of St. Thomas, judgment, although being what is most proper to intelligence in the function of knowing (*“when it begins to judge about an apprehended thing, then the very judgment of the intellect is something proper to it that is not found outside in reality”*: *De verit.*, loc. cit.) and as the summit of its activity, nonetheless stands as an interpretation and expression of the real in an active process of differentiation and relation of the same: *“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 perceptual 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 sentire”*: *De l’esprit*, I, 25), rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche) initiates the process of interiorization of judgment, not only as a function but also with respect to its very content, toward the roots of consciousness. In Kant, judgment in general *“is the faculty of thinking the particular as contained in the general”* (*Critique of Judgment*, Introduction, IV; Italian trans. by A. Gargiulo, Bari 1928, p. 17). It is at the center of cognitive activity as the act by which the multiplicity of representations is assumed into categorical synthesis. Through judgment, the process of unifying the matter of knowing in the unity of consciousness is accomplished. But since the universal forms both of sensibility (space and time) and of the intellect (categories) have a transcendental derivation, the synthesis, for the entire sphere of universal and necessary knowledge, is a priori insofar as the predicate under which the subject is subsumed is not drawn from experience and thus from the subject’s intuition (phenomenon), but precedes it as a condition of the very possibility of experience (*cf. Critique of Pure Reason*, Introduction, II, IV-V; I, II, entire). Kant’s a priori synthesis was the affirmation of the originality and autonomy of consciousness in the most delicate moment of its cognitive functions. This autonomy is without further limits in absolute idealism, in which judgment, as a process of determination and organization of the concept, is at once a process of determination and positing of reality: synthesis here functions as the very creativity of the contents of consciousness and thus of the real. Hegel rejects as *“extremely superficial”* (*Science of Logic*, Part 1, chap. 2; Italian trans. by A. Moni, III, Bari 1925, p. 77) the definition of judgment as “a union between two concepts.” Judgment is instead *“the determination of the concept posited within the concept itself”* (loc. cit., p. 71) or *“the self-determination of the concept”* (ibid.), *“the first actualization of the concept”* (ibid.). It implies subject and predicate, but *“the subject as such is at first only a kind 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 resolving of the concept by itself”* (loc. cit., p. 74; cf. *Encycl.*, §§ 166-80). In the Hegelian conception, the assertoric process of human thought through the three dialectical moments of affirming, negating, and reaffirming is the same movement by which the reality of the idea is determined (and thus posited) from within its spiritual energy. This conception of judgment is taken up in Italian idealism: judgment *“understood as logical judgment is neither prior nor posterior to the concept, because it is the concept itself in its actuality”* (B. Croce, *Logic*, Part 2, I, 6th ed., Bari 1942, p. 73); judgment *“is thought insofar as the synthesis of the two terms [subject and predicate] whereby being mediates itself in its identity with itself”* (G. Gentile, *System of Logic*, I, Part 2, chap. 4, 3rd ed., Florence 1940, p. 226): subject and predicate are, in the end, 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).
If one wishes to define the essential lines of a conception of judgment that meets the demands of realism, it is advisable to distinguish its three aspects: logical, epistemological-metaphysical, and psychological.
From the logical point of view, traditional philosophy has generally regarded the judgment as “a relationship of belonging or exclusion between two terms (ideas, concepts): subject and predicate”; the constitutive form of the relationship was indicated in the verb “to be” (in the sense of affirmation and negation), which Aristotle himself said was essential to any human discourse that intends to assert something (Perih., 5). The interpretation by classical logic of the structure of the judgment in general with the formula S is P aimed at its simplified and unitary reduction. This reduction presents the drawbacks proper to every simplification, inasmuch as the judgment, in the concrete unfolding of human discourse, assumes different structures that cannot be universally 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 some difficulties”); and impersonal judgments (“it is cold,” “it is not helpful to regret fortune”). In this last class of judgments, in reality there is no true subject, and the judgment reveals itself as a simple affirmation of a content (predicate): it can refer both to the pure observation of the presence and existence of empirical facts and to the affirmation of values of an intellectual-rational order: necessity, impossibility, probability, opportunity, duty, etc. The formula S is P is instead adequate for judgments of inherence (“man is mortal”), where a subject, through the decomposition and thus 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 relationship in extension—where the predicate class includes the subject (among mortal things there is man)—but, as Stuart Mill rightly demonstrated against Hamilton (Examination, 22; Logic, I, 5, § 3), in comprehension: “the content of the predicate belongs to the subject—mortality belongs to man.” This interpretation, also called the theory of belonging, inherence, or inhesion, which already prevails in Aristotle, resolves within itself the more general formula of connection (with the subject is the predicate).
Other formulas that define the judgment as association, composition, or synthesis of ideas (apart from the inadequacy of the term “idea” to express the contents of the judgment, which at times belong to the concreteness of sensible intuition) do not indicate its essential note, since they do not express the belonging of the predicate to the subject as its own determination and thus the unity (in an essential or accidental sense) of the predicate itself with the subject.
As for the logical distinctions of the judgment, which are better related to the proposition (v.), it should be noted that the division of the judgment into affirmative and negative refers solely to the content and not to the form of the assertive act. The judgment, in fact, as a mental act, is always an affirmation, even when it expresses the non-existence of a content or the non-belonging of a predicate to a subject. Moreover, the negative judgment is always in function of the affirmative one: of a given subject, not all predicates that do not belong to it are denied (the predication would be open to infinity), but only those that are improperly attributed or thought to be attributed to II.
From the epistemological-metaphysical point of view, the judgment involves the most delicate problems both with regard to content and form. The content (predicate and, in the class of attributive judgments, subject) first poses the problem of its derivation to the actuality of mental synthesis and, consequently, of its own ontological consistency. The analysis of the process by which human knowledge is constructed shows, in the first place, that the contents of consciousness around which an existential judgment can be formulated are given either in sensible intuition or in the perception that thought has of itself and of its own acts. But since the principle of both feeling and thinking cannot be understood as pure passivity, it follows that it is generally justified—and in particular for those judgments that seem to add to pure empirical data: “universals and necessary judgments of value”—to pose the problem of the possibility of a priori elements in the synthesis of the judgment. Activity, if it cannot be denied to thought (as also to sensibility) a transcendental structure, must not be understood in a Kantian sense as a noetic determination prior to all experience. Concepts and categories, even if 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 the 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 rather the assumption of real objectivity within the intentionality of consciousness. The a priori of thought, in Thomism, is its very power of expressing the a posteriori, its virtuality of conceptualization and affirmation, in the direction of being, of the real contents given in sensitive-intellectual intuition, and the power to determine the structure, properties, and relations.
The synthesis of subject and predicate implies, on the part of thought, a noetic fractionation of the objects of knowledge. The meaning of this fractionation is at the same time its raison d’être, as already referred to by St. Thomas in regard to the analytic structure of human intelligence: “... the human intellect does not immediately grasp perfect knowledge of a thing in its first apprehension; but first it apprehends something about it, for example, its quiddity...; and then it understands the properties and accidents and relations surrounding the essence of the thing. And according to this, it is necessary for it to compose and divide one apprehended thing with another, and to proceed from one composition and division to another” (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 85, a. 5, c.). In reality, the judgment, before presenting itself as a synthesis, involves a process of analysis. It is not an artificial composition of concepts, but rather a segregation and individualization, which, in the unity of the subject (of the given), the thought operates, of elements, properties, relations. The judgment decomposes, diffracts, and splits the empirical datum or concept into categorical multiplicity, bringing to light, under the impulse of practical or theoretical ends, the single values, and in the assertive act recomposing them to the subject. The judgment is therefore in function of our limited cognitive powers; it implies, in itself and through the discourse that expresses it, the extension in time of our knowledge and, in this sense, its fragmentariness. But at the same time it is an expression of the activity and initiative of the spirit that analyzes the object and grasps it in its internal structure, organizing it into a system of values and relations. In this way, being itself is articulated, through the dynamism of thought, in the organic structure of knowledge, of science, of philosophy. In a realistic sense, Hegel’s assertion is true: the judgment is the very determination of the concept and thus of reality.
The value of judgment as the autonomy and spontaneity of thought is revealed particularly in its essential and formal moment, the affirmation. The deepest meaning of judgment as affirmation and assent lies in overcoming the passivity of consciousness and its positivity as a principle of apperception, reflection, and universality. Through assent, consciousness in a certain way halts the purely perceptual course of its activity and, by assuming contents within the awareness of affirmation (the term, from *ad-firmare*, well expresses the determination and stability that contents assume in judgment; cf. the English *statement*), it elevates them to the plane of value, of being (in the most comprehensive sense of the term), and thus of the absolute. Even where the expression of affirmation through the verb *to be* is lacking or not essential (as in not a few languages, in impersonal and action judgments in other tongues), the affirmation itself is present as the most vital moment of the act, for every utterance of thought, by the reflective principle that determines it, implicitly entails the ascription: “it is so.” “Man thinks,” “let there be a true judgment expressed by thought,” is at once equivalent to “it is true that man thinks.” The universal value of being is thus shown to be immanent to the very essential form of thought, whereby judgment is among the most revelatory moments of the meaning of human knowledge. The ennobling of the term in common language (“to have judgment” = to think well and act rightly) in its own way underscores the value of the positivity inherent in judgment as such: a value that persists, as to its form, even when, in a false judgment, the content—that is, the relation expressed by the proposition—has no correspondence in reality.
3) Assent (adhesion, recognition, acceptance, consent) is a moment that transcends the cognitive act as apprehension or perception. If this implies, within the very structure of intellectual consciousness, a heterogeneity of functions, it does not lead to attributing assent to the will, as Descartes did (Meditations, IV; Principles of Philosophy, I, 32). Assent must instead be referred to the very power of consciousness 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. Summa Theologiae, 1a-2ae, q. 17, a. 6).
From a psychological standpoint, however, volition and all other conditions of personality are not absent from the assertive process and, above all, from its analytic moment. Indeed, in the individual temporal course of thought, the choice of the predicate in possible judgments about the contents offered by reality, and thus the determination of the subject in one direction rather than another of its predicates, is always related to the formation, culture, environment, aims, and interests that, as a substratum and biological impulse, direct the very course of consciousness. This is the principal reason for the breadth and variety of judgments that the social world of man entails in all its manifestations. From this perspective, 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 varying degrees, according to the clarity of intellectual perception and the sum of interests that different contents hold for the subject. Yet even when assent is total, it must not be understood, in itself alone, as an argument for the truth of the judgment. Assent follows intellectual perception; but this, while positing itself first as a relation of objectivity and universality, is at the same time situated within the individual concreteness of the human being and thus, 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: “Men—Cicero already warned—judge many things through hatred or love, desire or anger, pain or joy, hope or fear, error or some other movement of the mind rather than through truth or precept or any norm of justice or judicial formula or law” (De oratore, 2.42). It is not possible here to analyze the relations of interdependence of human judgment, in its origin and dialectical movement, with the total ontological-psychic synthesis of the person. From this perspective, judgment—which, it must be noted, as an essential function of thought, universally accompanies and guides the process of ideation—reaches to the deepest roots of the human being, and is thus at the boundaries of moral responsibility and freedom.
JUDGMENT: See PROCESS.