i. Judgment is the act which refers an ideal content recognized as
such to a reality beyond the act, predicating an idea of a reality, a
what of a that; so that the subject is reality and the predicate the
meaning of an idea, while the judgment refers the idea to reality by
an identity of content (Bradley and Bosanquet).
k. Judgment is an assertion of reality, requiring comparison and ideas
which render it directly expressible in words (Hobhouse, mainly
following Bradley).
These theories are of varying value in proportion to their proximity to
Aristotle's point that predication is about things, and to Mill's point
that judgments and propositions are about things, not about ideas. The
essence of judgment is belief that something is (or is not) determined,
either as existing (e.g. "I am," "A centaur is not") or as something in
particular (e.g. "I am a man," "I am not a monkey"). Neither Mill,
however, nor any of the later logicians whose theories we have quoted,
has been able quite to detach judgment from conception; they all suppose
that an idea, or ideas, is a condition of all judgment. But judgment
starts from sensation (_Empfindung_) and feeling (_Gefühl_), and not
from idea (_Vorstellung_). When I feel pleased or pained, or when I use
my senses to perceive a pressure, a temperature, a flavour, an odour, a
colour, a sound, or when I am conscious of feeling and perceiving, I
cannot resist the belief that something sensible is present; and this
belief that something exists is already a judgment, a judgment of
existence, and, so far as it is limited to sense without inference, a
true judgment. It is a matter of words whether or not we should call
this sensory belief a judgment; but it is no matter of choice to the
logician, who regards all the constituents of inference as judgments;
for the fundamental constituents are sensory beliefs, which are
therefore judgments in the logical sense. Sense is the evidence of
inference; directly of analogical and inductive, directly or indirectly
of deductive, inference; and therefore, if logic refuses to include
sensory beliefs among judgments, it will omit the fundamental
constituents of inference, inference will no longer consist of judgments
but of sensory beliefs plus judgments, and the second part of logic, the
logic of judgment, the purpose of which is to investigate the
constituents of inference, will be like _Hamlet_ without the prince of
Denmark. If, on the other hand, all the constituents of inference are
judgments, there are judgments of sense; and the evidence of the senses
means that a judgment of sense is true, while a judgment of inference is
true so far as it is directly or indirectly concluded from judgments of
sense. Now a sensory judgment, e.g. that a sensible pressure is
existing, is explained by none of the foregoing theories, because it
requires nothing but sensation and belief. It requires no will, but is
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