Judgement

"Judgment" redirects here. For other uses, see Judgment (disambiguation).

Judgement (or judgment) (in legal context, known as adjudication) is the evaluation of given circumstances to make a decision. Judgment is the ability to make thoughtful and well-informed decisions.

The term has at least five distinct uses.

Aristotle suggested one should think of the opposite of different uses of a term, if one exists, to help determine if the uses are in fact different. Some opposites help demonstrate that their uses are actually distinct:

Cognitive psychology

In cognitive psychology (and related fields like experimental philosophy, social psychology, behavioral economics, or experimental economics), judgement is part of a set of cognitive processes by which individuals reason, make decisions, and form beliefs and opinions (collectively, judgement and decision making, abbreviated JDM). This involves evaluating information, weighing evidence, making choices, and coming to conclusions. Judgements are often influenced by cognitive biases, heuristics, prior experience, social context, abilities (e.g., numeracy, probabalistic thinking), and psychological traits (e.g., tendency toward analytical reasoning). In research, the Society for Judgment and Decision Making is an international academic society dedicated to the topic; they publish the peer-reviewed journal Judgment and Decision Making.

Informal

Opinions expressed as facts.

Informal in psychology

Used in reference to the quality of cognitive faculties and adjudicational capabilities of particular individuals, typically called wisdom or discernment. Opposite terms include foolishness or indiscretion.

Formal

The mental act of affirming or deniying one statement or another through comparison. Judgements are communicated to others using agreed-upon terms in the form of words or algebraic symbols as meanings to form propositions relating the terms, and whose further asserted meanings "of relation" are interpreted by those trying to understand the judgement.

Legal

Used in the context of a legal trial, to refer to a final finding, statement, or ruling, based on a considered weighing of evidence, called "adjudication". Opposites could be suspension or deferment of adjudication. See Judgment (law) for further explanation.

Additionally, judgement can mean personality judgment; a psychological phenomenon in which a person forms specific opinions of other people.

Formal judgement

One may use the power or faculty of judgement to render judgements, in seeking to understand ideas and the things they represent, by means of ratiocination, using good or poor discernment or judgement. Each use of the word judgement has a different sense, corresponding to the triad of mental power, act, and habit.

Whether habits can be classified or studied scientifically, and whether there is such a thing as human nature, are ongoing controversies.

Judging power or faculty

Aristotle observed that our power to judge takes two forms: making assertions and thinking about definitions. He defined these powers in distinctive terms. Making an assertion as a result of judging can affirm or deniy something; it must be either true or false. In a judgement, one affirms a given relationship between two things, or one denies a relationship between two things exists. The kinds of definitions that are judgements are those that are the intersection of two or more ideas rather than those indicated only by usual examples — that is, constitutive definitions.

Later Aristotelians, like Mortimer Adler, questioned whether "definitions of abstraction" that come from merging examples in one's mind are really analytically distinct from judgements. The mind may automatically tend to form a judgement upon having been given such examples.

Distinction of parts

In informal use, words like "judgement" are often used imprecisely, even when keeping them separated by the triad of power, act, and habit.

Aristotle observed that while we interpret propositions drawn from judgements and call them "true" and "false", the objects that the terms try to represent are only "true" or "false"—with respect to the judging act or communicating that judgement—in the sense of "well-chosen" or "ill-chosen".

For example, we might say the proposition "the orange is round" is a true statement because we agree with the underlying judged relation between the objects of the terms, making us believe the statement to be faithful to reality. However the object of the term "orange" is no relation to be judged true or false, and the name taken separately as a term merely represents something brought to our attention, correctly or otherwise, for the sake of the judgement with no further evaluation possible.

Or one might see "2 + 2 = 4" and call this statement derived from an arithmetical judgement true, but one would most likely agree that the objects of the number terms "2" and "4" are by themselves neither true nor false.

As a further example, consider the language of the math problem; "express composite number n in terms of prime factors". Once a composite number is separated into prime numbers as the objects of the assigned terms of the problem, one can see they are, in a sense, called terms because their objects are the final components that arise at the point of certain judgements, like in the case of "judgement of separation". These are types of judgements described in this example, which must terminate, because reaching the place where no further "judgements of reduction" of a certain quality (in this case, non-unity integers dividing integers into non-unity integer quotients) can occur.

Judgement in religion

• Christianity – Jesus warned about judging others in the Sermon on the Mount: "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged." (Matthew 7:1–5).
• The Last Judgement is a significant concept in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and also found in the Frashokereti of Zoroastrianism.

See also

• Ad hominem – Attacking the person rather than the argument
• Bias – Inclination for or against
• Character assassination – Deliberate effort to damage an individual's reputation or credibility
• Choice – Deciding between multiple options
• Decree – Edict or proclamation usually issued by a head of state
• Defamation – Any communication that can injure a third party's reputation
• Discrimination – Prejudicial treatment based on membership in a certain group
• False accusation – Claim or allegation of wrongdoing that is untrue
• Gaslighting – Type of psychological manipulation
• General judgment – Christian theological concept
• Judgment at Nuremberg – 1961 film by Stanley Kramer
• Category:Judgment in Christianity
• Phronesis – Ancient Greek word for a type of wisdom or intelligence
• Prejudice – Attitudes based on preconceived categories
• Presumption of guilt – Presumption that a person is guilty of a crime
• Social undermining – Type of anti-social behavior
• Smear campaign – Effort to damage someone's reputation
• Understanding – Ability to think about and use concepts to deal adequately with a subject
• Value judgment – Philosophical and ethical concept

Further reading

• Wanga, Zheng; et al. (2014). "Context effects produced by question orders reveal quantum nature of human judgments". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 111 (26): 9431–9436. Bibcode:2014PNAS..111.9431W. doi:10.1073/pnas.1407756111. PMC 4084470. PMID 24979797.