JUDGMENT. - Judgment (Gr. ἀπόφασις, κατάφασις, Lat. iudicium, propositio, enunciatio, sententia) is the act by which thought affirms (or denies) something. The Latin term belongs in its immediate reference to juridical language. Ius dicere (Gr. δικάζειν, κρίνειν) meant "to exercise jurisdictional activity," and iudicium was this same activity and furthermore the trial or the discussion of the case: "dedicere causam aliquam in iudicium" (Cicero, De opt. gen. orat., 7, 18). Nor is the use of the term in the sense of "opinion," "view" lacking in classical Latinity (id., Tuscul., I, 1) and, more rarely, in the sense of "sentence": "vos multis iam iudiciis iudiciatis" (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 latter meaning: judgment indicates in fact, in a logical-gnoseological sense, the decision, through affirmation, and the pronouncement of thought concerning the contents of knowledge. Understood thus, judgment is the fundamental process of thought in act and the highest noetic function of subjectivity and of the I, which through it commits itself and takes a position before being (existence, essence, phenomena, becoming) and thus posits, in 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 is 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 takes on the meaning of recognition of the existence, nature and relations 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, on the other hand, reality (or part of it) is understood as a positing of consciousness, then judgment takes on the opposite meaning, as the process by which reality is constructed, organizing itself in the forms of the 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 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 judgment, although in its logical structure it is a synthesis, can also be considered as a division (Ἐνδέχεται δὲ καὶ διαίρεσιν φάναι πάντα: De anima, loc. cit., 430 b 34), insofar as the predicate, as determination in act, arises from a process of segregation operated 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), nonetheless reaffirms its requirement of adequation to reality itself: "quando adaequatur ei quod est extra in re dicitur iudicium verum esse. Tunc autem iudicat intellectus de re apprehensa quando dicit quod aliquid est vel non est, quod est intellectus componentis et dividentis" (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 the mental synthesis with reality must be understood). In the thought of St. Thomas, judgment, although it is what is most proper to the intelligence in the function of knowing ("quando incipit iudicare de re apprehensa, tunc ipsum iudicium intellectus est quoddam proprium ei quod non invenitur extra in re": De verit., loc. cit.) and as the summit of its activity, nonetheless posits itself as interpretation and expression of the real in an active process of differentiation and relationalization of the same: "Unde sic intellectus cognoscit multa componendo et dividendo sicut cognoscendo differentiam et comparationem rerum" (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 "union or separation of representations": Essay, IV, ch. 5, § 2 ff.; for Helvétius "juger est sentir": De l'esprit, I, 25), rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche) initiates the process of interiorization of judgment, not only as function but as regards 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, introd., IV; Ital. trans. by A. Gargiulo, repr. Bari 1928, p. 17). It is at the center of cognitive activity as the act by which the manifold of representations is taken up into the categorial synthesis. Through judgment the process of unification of 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 (categorial) have a transcendental derivation, the synthesis, for 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. Critique of Pure Reason, introd., II, IV-V; I, II, entire). The Kantian a priori synthesis was the affirmation of the originality and autonomy of consciousness in the most delicate moment of its cognitive functions. Such autonomy is without further limits in absolute idealism, in which judgment as a process of determination and organization of the concept is at the same time a process of determination and positing of reality: the synthesis here counts as the very creativity of the contents of consciousness and therefore of the real. Hegel rejects as "extremely superficial" (Science of Logic, sec. 1, ch. 2; Ital. 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 self-determining of the concept for itself" (ibid.), "the first realization 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 diremption of the concept by its own agency"
(loc. cit., p. 74; cf. Enc., §§ 166-80). In the Hegelian conception the assertory process of human thought through the three dialectical moments of affirming, denying, reaffirming is the same movement by which the reality of the idea determines itself (and therefore posits itself) from within its spiritual energy. This conception of judgment is taken up again in Italian idealism: judgment "understood as logical judgment is neither prins nor posterius with respect to the concept, because it is the concept itself in its effectuality" (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, ch. 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," as predicate the "determining term" (loc. cit., p. 227).
To define the essential lines of a conception of judgment [g.] that responds to the demands of realism, it is appropriate to distinguish three aspects: logical, gnoseological-metaphysical, and psychological.
1) From the logical point of view, traditional philosophy has generally considered judgment as "a relation of belonging or exclusion between two terms (ideas, concepts): subject and predicate"; the constitutive form of the relation was indicated in the verb to be (in the sense of affirmation and negation), which already Aristotle said was essential to any human discourse that intends to assert something (Perih., 5). The interpretation by classical logic of the structure of judgment in general with the formula S is P aimed at a simplified and unitary reduction of it. Such a reduction presents the drawbacks proper to every simplification, inasmuch as judgment, in the concrete unfolding of human discourse, assumes diverse structures, not universally expressible by that formula. Such are, for example, judgments of action ("the sun shines," which cannot be identified with "the sun is shining"); judgments of relation ("heat makes bodies expand"); judgments of existence ("there are difficulties") and impersonal judgments ("it is cold," "it does not profit to complain of fortune"). In this last class of judgments a true subject is in reality lacking, and the judgment reveals itself as a simple affirmation of a content (predicate): it can refer both to the pure ascertainment of the presence and existence of empirical facts and to the affirmation of values of an intellective-rational order: necessity, impossibility, probability, opportuneness, duty, etc. The formula S is P is on the other hand adequate for judgments of inerence ("man is mortal"), where a subject, by way of the decomposition and therefore attribution of its predicates, determines itself in its essential or possible relations. For this entire class of judgments, the logical interpretation that best expresses their structure is not the one that sees the relation S-P in extension (the subject is included in the class of the predicate — among mortal things there is man), but rather, 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). Such an interpretation, also called the theory of belonging, inerence, inexistence, which is already prevalent in Aristotle, resolves in itself the more generic formula of connection (with the subject is the predicate). Other formulas that define judgment as association, composition, 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 sensible intuition) do not indicate its essential note, inasmuch as they do not express the belonging of the predicate to the subject as its own determination and therefore the unity (in an essential or accidental sense) of the same predicate with the subject.
Regarding the logical distinctions of judgment, which are better related to the 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 non-existence of a content or the non-belonging of a predicate to a subject. The negative judgment, moreover, is always in function of the affirmative one: of a given subject one does not deny all the predicates that do not belong to it (predication would be open to infinity), but only those that have been unduly attributed to it or that one thinks could or intends to attribute to it.
2) From the gnoseological-metaphysical point of view, judgment involves the most delicate problems, both as regards content and as regards form. The content (predicate and, in the class of judgments of attribution, subject) poses first of all the problem of its derivation to the actuality of the mental synthesis and, therefore, of its 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 a judgment of existence 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 sensing and thinking cannot be understood as pure passivity, it follows that the problem of the possibility of a priori elements in the synthesis of judgment is justified in general — and in particular for those judgments that seem additive to the pure empirical datum: universal and necessary judgments, judgments of value. Nevertheless, if a transcendental structure cannot be denied to thought (as also to sensibility), it must not be understood in the Kantian sense of a noetic determination anterior to every experience. Concepts and categories, albeit in the direction of the transcendental actuality of thought, are born within experience as intentional determinations of its real contents. This is the fundamental meaning of judgment in Thomism, in which the whole construction of knowledge (the system of judgments) is not a movement of consciousness toward the positing of objects, but an assumption of real objectivity into the intentionality of consciousness. The a priori of thought is, in Thomism, 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-intellective intuition, and the power to determine their structure, properties, and relations.
The synthesis of subject and predicate implies on the part of thought a noetic fractioning into objects of knowledge. The meaning of this fractioning and at the same time its reason for being was already referred by St. Thomas to the analytic structure of the human intellect: "... 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., 1a, q. 85, a. 5, c.). In reality judgment, before positing itself as synthesis, involves a process of analysis. It is not an artificial composition of concepts, but rather a segregation and an individualization, which in the unity of the subject (of the datum) thought performs, of elements, properties, relations. Judgment decomposes, diffracts, splits the empirical datum or the concept into a multiplicity of categorial aspects, bringing into emergence, under the impulse of practical or theoretical ends, the individual values, and in the assertive act recomposing them to the subject. Judgment is therefore in function of our limited cognitive powers; it implies, for itself and through the discourse that expresses it, the distension 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 surprises it in its internal structure, organizing it into a system of values and relations. Being in this way articulates itself, through the dynamism of thought, into the organicity of knowledge, of science, of philosophy. In a realistic sense, Hegel's affirmation is true that judgment is the very determination of the concept, and therefore of reality.
The value of judgment as autonomy and spontaneity of thought is revealed particularly in its essential and formal moment, affirmation. The deepest meaning of judgment as affirmation and assent is the overcoming of the passivity of consciousness and the positivity of this consciousness as a principle of apperception, reflection and universality. Through assent, consciousness in a certain way halts the purely perceptive course of its activity and, taking up contents into the awareness of affirmation (the term, from ad-firmare, well 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 lacking, or is not essential (as in not a few languages) (in other languages in impersonal and action judgments), the affirmation itself remains as the most living moment of the act, inasmuch as every pronouncement of thought, by the reflective principle that determines it, entails at the same time the implicit assertion: "so it is." "Man thinks," where it is a true judgment expressed by thought, is worth at the same time "it is true that man thinks." The universal value of being is thus shown to be immanent in the very essential form of thought, whereby judgment is among the most revealing moments of the meaning of human knowledge. The ennobling of the term in current language ("to have judgment" = to think well and act well) underlines 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, perception. If this argues, within the very structure of intellectual consciousness, a heterogeneity of functions, it does not lead to attributing assent to the will, as maintained by Descartes (Med., IV; Princ. philos., I, 32). Assent should instead be referred to the very power of consciousness to give an account of its object and express it to itself in the domain of reflection: it is the completeness of the cognitive act, the sanction and the word spoken by the spirit upon 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 the personality are not absent from the assertive process and first of all from its analytic moment. In fact, in the individual situations of the temporal course of individual thought, the choice of the predicate of the possible judgments concerning the contents offered by reality, and therefore the determination of the subject in one direction rather than another of its predicates, is always related to the formation, culture, environment, aims, and interest that direct, as biological substratum and impulse, the course of consciousness itself. In this lies the principal reason for the extension 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 actualized.
The force of affirmation or assent presents different gradations, according to the clarity of intellectual perception and the sum of interests that the various contents present for the subject. Yet even when assent is total it should not be understood, by itself alone, as an argument for the truth of the judgment. Assent indeed follows upon intellectual perception; but this, although it posits itself first of all as a relation of objectivity and universality, consists at the same time in the individual concreteness of the human being and therefore in a relation, as has been said, of mutual action and reaction with the will and the other elements that make up the structure of the person: "Plura - Cicero already warned - 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 of human judgment, in its origin and in its dialectical movement, with the ontological-psychic totality of the personal synthesis. In 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, at the boundaries of moral responsibility and freedom.
Bibliography16 works
Ugo Viglino