Lecture Iv Types of Judgment and the General Conditions

INVOLVED IN ASSERTION

Correspondence between types of Judgment and nature of objects as Knowledge

1. The question of correspondence between the types of Judgment and the orders of Knowledge was really anticipated in discussing the relation between the content and the form of knowledge. We saw that the content or matter and nature known determines on the whole the form or method of knowledge by which it can be known.

I give a few cases of this correspondence, not professing to complete the list. We should accustom ourselves to think of these forms as constituting a progression in the sense that each of them betrays a reference to an ideal of knowledge which in itself it is unable to fulfil, and therefore inevitably suggests some further or divergent form. And the defect by which the forms contradict the ideal, is felt by us as a defect in their grasp of reality, in their presentation of real connections.

“Impersonal” Judgment

a. We think of the judgment as predicating an ideal content of a subject indicated in present perception. But there are judgments which scarcely have an immediate subject at all, such as “How hot!” “Bad!” “It hurts!” In the judgments thus represented the true subject is some {62} undefined aspect of the given complex presentation. Of course the words which we use are not an absolutely safe guide to the judgment--they may be merely an abbreviation. But there are typical judgments of this kind in which we merely mean to connect some namable content with that which can only be defined as the focus of attention at the moment. Such judgments might be called predications of mere quality. The only link by which they bind their parts into a whole is a feeling referred to our momentary surroundings. A mere quality, if not defined or analysed, or a feeling of pleasure or pain, is the sort of object which can be expressed in such a judgment.

Perceptive Judgment

b. Then we have the very wide sphere of perceptive judgment, which we may most conveniently confine to judgments which have in the subject elements analogous to “This,” “Here,” “Now.” Such particles as these indicate an effort to distinguish elements within the complex presented. They have no content beyond the reference to presentation, and, in “here” and “now,” an implication that the present is taken in a particular kind of continuum. Otherwise they mean nothing more or other than is meant by pointing with the finger. We may or may not help out a “subject” of this kind by definite ideas attached to it as conditions of the judgment. If we do, we are already on the road to a new form of knowledge, incompatible with the judgment of perception. For so long as we keep a demonstrative, spatial or temporal, reference in the thought, the subject of judgment is not cut loose from our personal focus of presentation. And as the existence of such a focus is undeniable, we are secure against criticism so far as the {63} content of the subject is concerned. But if we begin to specify it, we do so at our peril.

Such judgments as these have been called “Analytic judgments of sense.” The term is not generally accepted in this meaning, but is conveniently illustrative of the nature of these judgments. It is intended to imply that they are a breaking up and reconstruction of what, in our usual loose way of talking, is said to be given in sense-perception. They remain on the whole within the complex of “that which” is presented.

Mr. F.H. Bradley, Principles of Logic, p. 48.

From the point of view which we have taken, such judgments are not confined to what we think it worth while to say, but are the essence of every orderly and objective perception of the world around us. In a waking human consciousness nothing is unaffirmed.

We have no other term than perception to express the process which is employed in scientific observation and experiment. But it is plain that so soon as the judgment that refers to “This” is modified through the inevitable demand for qualification by exact ideas--“This hurts me,” “What hurts you?” “This old sprain, at the pace we are walking”--a conflict of elements has arisen within the judgment. And as commonplace perception passes into scientific observation, the qualifying ideas, on which truth and relevancy depend, dwarf the importance of the “this,” and ultimately oust it altogether. That is a simple case in which the ideal of knowledge and the nature of reality operate within the judgment to split asunder its primitive form. The subject as expressed by a pure demonstrative refuses to {64} take account either of truth, i.e. consistency with knowledge as a whole, or of relevancy, i.e. consistency with the relation involved in the particular predication that may be in question. Our commonplace perception halts between these two extremes. It deals with the world of individual objects and persons, which, being already systematised according to our current observations and interests, has, so long as we keep to its order, a sufficient degree of truth and relevancy for the needs of daily life. Thus if I say, “This book will do as a desk to write upon,” the truth of the qualification “book” (i.e. the reality of the subject) is assumed on the ground of the facility of recognising a well-known “thing,” while the relevancy of the qualification “book” is not questioned, because we accept an individual thing as an object of habitual interest qua individual, and do not demand that whenever it is named those properties alone should be indicated which are relevant to the purpose for which it is named. The “thing” is a current coin of popular thought, and makes common perception workable without straining after a special relevancy in the subject of every predication. Such special relevancy leads ultimately to the ideal of definition, in which subject and predicate are adequate to each other and necessarily connected. A definitory judgment drops the demonstrative and relies on qualifying ideas alone. It is therefore an abstract universal Judgment, while the Judgment of Perception, so long as it retains the demonstrative, is a Singular Judgment.

Proper names in Judgment

c. But a very curious example of a divergence or half-way house in Knowledge is that form of the singular Judgment in which the subject is a proper name. A proper name is {65} designative and not definitory. It may be described as a generalised demonstrative pronoun--a demonstrative pronoun which has the same particular reference in the mouth of every one who uses, it, and beyond the given present of time.

So the reference of a proper name is a good example of what we called a universal or an identity. That which is referred to by such a name is a person or thing whose existence is extended in time and its parts bound together by some continuous quality--an individual person or thing and the whole of this individuality is referred to in whatever is affirmed about it. Thus the reference of such a name is universal, not as including more than one individual, but as including in the identity of the individual numberless differences--the acts, events, and relations that make up its history and situation.

What kinds of things are called by Proper Names, and why? This question is akin to the doctrine of Connotation and Denotation, which will be discussed in the next lecture. It is a very good problem to think over beforehand, noting especially the limiting cases, in which either some people give proper names to things to which other people do not give them, or some things are given proper names while other things of the same general kind are not. These judgments, which are both Singular and Universal, may perhaps be called for distinction’s sake “Individual” Judgments.

Abstract Judgment

d. The demonstrative perception may also be replaced by a more or less complete analysis or definition.

Within this province Definition of a concrete whole is one extreme, e.g. “Human Society is a system of wills”; {66} that of an abstract whole the other extreme, “12 = 7 + 5.” There are all degrees, between these two, in the amount of modification which the parts undergo by belonging to the whole. There are also all sorts of incomplete definitions, expressing merely the effects of single conditions out of those which go to make up a whole. These form the abstract universal judgments of the exact sciences, such as, “If water is heated to 212° Fahr. under one atmosphere it boils.” In all these cases some idea, “abstract” as being cut loose from the focus of present perception, whether abstract or concrete in its content, replaces the demonstrative of the judgment which is a perception. These are the judgments which in the ordinary logical classification rank as universal.

The general definition of Judgment

2. It was quite right of us to consider some types of judgment before trying to define it generally. It is hopeless to understand a definition unless the object to be defined is tolerably familiar. We have said a great deal about knowledge and about judgment as the organ or medium of knowledge. Now we want to study particular judgments in their parts and working, and observe how they perform their function of constructing reality.

Now, for our purpose, we may take the clearest cases of judgment, viz. the meanings of propositions.

The distinctive character of Judgment as contrasted with every other act of mind is that it claims to be true, i.e. pre-supposes the distinction between truth and falsity.

First, we have to consider what is implied in claiming truth.

Secondly, by what means truth is claimed in Judgment.

{67} Thirdly, the nature of the ideas for which alone truth can be claimed.

What is implied in claiming truth

(i.) Claiming truth implies the distinction between truth and falsity. I do not say, “between truth and falsehood,” because falsehood includes a lie, and a lie is not prima facie, an error or falsity of knowledge. It is, as may be said of a question, altogether addressed to another person, and has no existence as a distinct species within knowledge. Thus a lie is called by Plato “falsehood in words”; the term “falsehood in the mind” he reserves for ignorance or error, which he treats as the worst of the two, which from an intellectual point of view it plainly is.

No distinction between truth and falsity can exist unless, in the act or state which claims truth, there is a reference to something outside psychical occurrence in the course of ideas. Falsity or error are relations that imply existences which, having reality of one kind, claim in addition to this another kind of reality which they have not. In fact, all things that are called false, are called so because they claim a place or property which they do not possess. They must exist, in order to be false. It is in the non-fulfilment, by their existence, of some claim or pretension which it suggests, that falsity consists. And so it is in the fulfilment of such a claim that truth has a meaning. A false coin exists as a piece of metal; it is false because it pretends to a place in the monetary system which its properties or history contradict.

For it is, I suppose, technically false, even if over value, if not coined by those who have the exclusive legal right to coin.

As the claim to be true is made by every judgment in its {68} form, there can be no judgment without some recognition of a difference between psychical occurrences and the system of reality. That is to say, there is no judgment unless the judging mind is more or less aware that it is possible to have an idea which is not in accordance with reality.

Thus, if an animal has no real world distinct from his train of mental images, if, that is, and just because, these are his world directly, and without discord, he cannot judge. The question is, e.g. when he seems disappointed, whether the pleasant image simply disappears and a less pleasant image takes its place, or whether the erroneous image was distinguished as an element in “a mere idea,” which could be retained and compared with the systematised perceptions which force it out, as an idea with reality.

It will be observed that we are not treating the mental images as being taken for such by the primitive mind. It is just in as far as they are not yet taken for such that they are merely such. Mr. James says that the first sensation is for the child the universe (Psychology II. 7). But it is a universe in which all is equally mere fact, and there is no distinction of truth and falsehood, or reality and unreality. That can only come when an existent is found to be a fraud.

We must all of us have seen a dog show signs of pleasure when he notices preparations for a walk, and then express the extreme of unhappiness when the walk is not taken at all, or he is left at home. People interpret these phenomena very carelessly. They say “he thought that he was going to be taken out.” If he did “think that, etc,” then he made a judgment. This would imply that he distinguishes between the images suggested to his mind, and the reality of their content as the future event of going out, and knew that he might have the one without the other following. But of {69} course it is quite possible that the dog has no distinct expectation of something different from his present images, but merely derives pleasure from them, which he expresses, and suffers and expresses pain when they are replaced by something else. It is here, no doubt, in the conflict of suggestion and perception, that judgment originates.

On the other hand, animals, especially domestic animals, do seem to use the imperative, which perhaps implies that they know what they want, and have it definitely contrasted with their present ideas as something to be realised.

However this may be, the claim of truth marks the minimum of Judgment. There can be no judgment until we distinguish psychical fact from the reference to Reality. A mere mental fact as such is not true or false. In other words, there is no judgment unless there is something that, formally speaking, is capable of being denied. When your dog sees you go to the front door, he may have an image of hunting a rabbit suggested to his mind, but so far there is nothing that can be denied. If he has the image, of course he has. There is nothing that can be denied until the meaning of this image is treated as a further fact beyond the image itself, in a system independent of the momentary consciousness in his mind. Then it is possible to say, “No, the fact does not correspond to your idea,” i.e. what we are ultimately obliged to think as a system is inconsistent with the idea as you affirmed it of the same system.

By what means the claim to truth is made

(ii.) The first thing then in Judgment is that we must have a world of reality distinguished from the course of our ideas. Thereupon the claim to truth is actually made by attaching the meaning of an idea to some point in the real {70} world. This can only be done where an identity is recognised between reality and our meaning.

Thus (keeping to the Judgment of Perception) I say, “This table is made of oak.” This table is given in perception already qualified by numberless judgments; it is a point in the continuous system or tissue which we take as reality. Among its qualities it has a certain grain and colour in the wood. I know the colour and grain of oak-wood, and if they are the same as those of the table, then the meaning or content “made of oak” coalesces with this point in reality, and instead of merely saying, “This table is made of wood that has such and such a grain and colour,” I am able to say “This table is made of oak-wood.”

This example shows the true distinction between the Logical Subject and Predicate. The fact is, that the ultimate subject in Judgment is always Reality. Of course the logical subject may be quite different from the grammatical subject. Some kinds of words cannot in strict grammar be made subjects of a sentence, though they can represent a logical subject quite well: e.g. “Now is the time.” “Here is the right place_.” Adverbs, I suppose, cannot be grammatical subjects. But in these sentences they stand for the logical subjects, certain points in the perceptive series.

The true logical subject then is always reality, however much disguised by qualifications or conditions. The logical predicate is always the meaning of an idea; and the claim to be true consists in the affirmation of the meaning as belonging to the tissue of reality at the point indicated by the subject. The connection is always made by identity of {71} content at the point where the idea joins the reality, so that the judgment always appears as a revelation of something which is in reality. It simply develops, accents, or gives accuracy to a recognised quality of the real. This is easily seen in cases of simple quality--e.g. “This colour is sky-blue.” The colour is given, and the judgment merely identifies it with sky-blue, and so reveals another element belonging to its identity, the element of being seen in the sky on a clear day.

The analysis is not quite so easy when there is a concrete subject like a person; for how can there be an identity between a person and a fact? “A.B. passed me in the street this afternoon.” Between what elements is the identity in this case? It is between him, as an individual whom I know by sight in other places, and him as he appeared this afternoon in particular surroundings. His identity already extends through a great many different particulars of time and place, and this judgment merely recognises one more particular as included in the same continuous history. “He in this context belongs to him in a former context.” In this simple case the operative identity is probably that of my friend’s personal appearance; but the judgment is not merely about that but about his whole personality, of which his personal appearance is merely taken as a sign.

Any assertion which is incredible because the identical quality is wanting will illustrate the required structure. There is a story commented on by Thackeray in one of his occasional papers, which implied that the Duke of Wellington took home note-paper from a club to which he did not {72} belong. (Thackeray gives the true explanation of the fact on which the suggestion was founded.) The identity concerned in this case would be that of character. Can we find an identity between the character involved in a piece of meanness like that suggested and the character of the Duke of Wellington? No; and prima facie therefore the judgment is false. The identity which should bind it together breaks it in two. But yet, again: supposing the external evidence to be strong enough, we may have to accept a fact which conflicts with a man’s character as we conceive it. That is so: in such a case one kind of identity appears to contradict the other. I may think that I saw a man with my own eyes, doing something which wholly contradicts his character as I judge it. Then there is a conflict between identity in personal appearance and identity in character, and we have to criticise the two estimates of identity--i.e. to refer them both to our general system of knowledge, and to accept the connection which can be best adapted to that system.

We have got, then, as the active elements in Judgment a Subject in Reality, the meaning of an idea, and an identity between them.

Is this enough? Have we the peculiar act of affirmation wherever we have these conditions?

This is not the question by what elements of language the judgment is rendered. We shall speak of that in the next lecture. The question is now, simply, “Is a significant idea, referred to reality, always an assertion?”

The first answer seems to be that such an idea is always in an assertion, but need not constitute the whole of an {73} assertion. If we think of a subject in judgment which is represented by a relative sentence, it seems clear that any idea which can stand a predicate can also form a part of a subject. “The exhibition which it is proposed to hold at Chicago in 1893”--has in effect just the same elements of meaning, and just the same reference to a point in our world of reality as if the sentence ran, “It is proposed to hold an exhibition at Chicago in 1893.” In common parlance we should say, that in the former case we entertain an idea--or conceive or represent it--while in the latter case we affirm it.

But if we go on to say that the former kind of sentence as truly represents the nature of thought as the latter, then it seems that we are mistaken. Even language does not admit such a clause to the rank of an independent sentence.

If we insist on considering it in its isolation, we probably eke it out in thought by an unarticulated affirmation such as that which constitutes an impersonal judgment; in other words, we affirm it to belong to reality under some condition which remains unspecified. Thus the linguistic form of the relative clause, as also the separate existence of the spoken or written word, produces an illusion which has governed the greater part of logical theory so far as concerns the separation between concept and judgment, i.e. between entertaining ideas and affirming them in reality. In our waking life, all thought is judgment, every idea is referred to reality, and in being so referred, is ultimately affirmed of reality. The separation of elements in the texture of Judgment into Subjects and Predicates which, as separated, are conceived as possible Subjects and Predicates, is therefore {74} theoretical and ideal, an analysis of a living tissue, not an enumeration of loose bricks out of which something is about to be built up.

The kind of ideas which can claim truth

(iii.) “Idea” has two principal meanings.

(a) A psychical presentation and

(b) An identical reference.

This distinction is the same as that between our course of ideas and our world of knowledge. We must try now to define it more accurately.

(a) An idea as a psychical presentation is strictly a particular. Every moment of consciousness is full of a given complex of presentation which passes away and can never be repeated without some difference. For this purpose a representation is just the same as a presentation; is, in fact, a presentation. Its detail at any given moment is filled in by the influence of the moment, and it can never occur again with precisely the same elements of detail as before. If we use the term “idea” in this sense, as a momentary particular mental state, it is nonsense to speak of having the same idea twice, or of referring it to a reality other than our mental life. The idea in this sense is a psychical image. We cannot illustrate this usage by any recognisable part of our mental furniture, for every such part which can be described and indicated by a general name, is something more than a psychical image. We can only say that that which at any moment we have in consciousness, when our waking perception encounters reality, is such an idea, and so too is the image supplied by memory, when considered simply as a datum, a fact, in our mental history.

(b) To get at the other sense of “idea” we should think {75} of the meaning of a word; a very simple case is that of a proper name. What is the meaning of “St. Paul’s Cathedral in London”? No two people who have seen it have carried away precisely the same image of it in their minds, nor does memory, when it represents the Cathedral to each of them, supply the same image in every detail and association twice over to the same person, nor do we for a moment think that such an image is the Cathedral. Yet we neither doubt that the name means something, and that the same to all those who employ it, nor that it means the same to each of them at one time that it did at every other time. The psychical images which formed the first vision of it are dead and gone for ever, and so, after every occasion on which it has been remembered, are those in which that memory was evoked. The essence of the idea does not lie in the peculiarities of any one of their varying presentations, but in the identical reference that runs through them all, and to which they all serve as material, and the content of this reference is the object of our thought.

When we are actually looking at the Cathedral, we say, “That is the Cathedral.” Does not this mean that we take our momentary image, to which we point, to be the reality of the Cathedral? Not precisely so. It is the “that,” not our definite predication about it, which makes us so confident. The “that” is identified by our judgment, but goes beyond it.

In order to distinguish and employ this reference it is necessary that there should be a symbol for it, and so long as it brings us to the object which is the centre of the entire system, this symbol may vary within considerable limits.

The commonest and most secure means of reference is {76} the word or name. So confident are we in the “conventional” or artificially adapted character of this mark or sign of reference, that we are inclined to treat it as absolutely unvarying on every occasion of utterance. But of course it is not unvarying. It differs in sound every time it is spoken, and in context and appearance every time we see it in a written shape. Our reliance upon it as identical throughout depends on the fact that it has a recognisable character to which its variations are irrelevant, and which practically crushes out these variations from our attention. Unless we are on the look-out for mispronunciations or misprints, they do not interfere at all with our attention to the main reference of words. We know that it is almost impossible to detect misprints so long as one reads a book with attention to its meaning. This then is a fair parallel to the distinction which we are considering between two kinds of ideas. If the momentary sound or look of a word is analogous to idea as psychical presentation, “the word” as a permanent possession of our knowledge is analogous to the idea as a reference to an object in our systematic world, and is the normal instrument of such a reference.

“A name is a sound which has significance according to convention,” i.e. according to rational agreement.--Ar. de Interp. 16a 19.

But either with the word or without it there may be a symbol of another kind. Any psychical image that falls within certain limits may appear as the momentary vehicle of the constant reference to an object. Just as in recognising the reference of a word we omit to notice the accent and loudness with which it is pronounced, or the quality of the paper on which it is printed, just so in recognising the {77} reference of a psychical image our attention fails to note its momentary context, colouring, and detail. If it includes something that definitely belongs to a systematic object in our world of objects, that is enough, unless counteracted by cross references, to effect the suggestion we require, and that, and nothing else, arrests our attention for the moment. When I think of St. Paul’s Cathedral, it may be the west front, or the dome seen from the outside, or the gallery seen from the inside, that happens to occur to my mind; and further, that which does occur to me occurs in a particular form or colouring, dictated by the condition of my memory and attention at the moment. But these peculiarities are dwarfed by the meaning, and unless I consider them for psychological purposes, I do not know that they are there. It is the typical element only, the element which points to the common reference in which my interest centres, that forms the content of the idea in this sense, taken not as a transient feature of the mental complex, but as definitely suggesting a constant object in our constructed world. And it suggests this object because it, the typical element, is a common point that links together the various cases and the various presentations in which the object is given to us. In this sense it is a universal or an identity.

How can this conception of a logical idea be applied to a perfectly simple presentation? It would be impossible so to apply it, but there does not seem to be such a thing as a simple presentation in the sense of a presentation that has no connection as a universal with anything else. In the image of a particular blue colour, we cannot indeed separate out what makes it blue from what makes it the particular {78} shade of blue that it is. But nevertheless its blueness makes it a symbol to us of blue in general, and when so thought of, crushes out of sight all the visible peculiarities that attend every spatial surface. We understand perfectly well that the colour is blue, and that in saying this we have gone beyond the limits of the momentary image, and have referred something in it as a universal quality to our world of objects. An idea, in this sense, is both less and more than a psychical image. It contains less, but stands for more. It includes only what is central and characteristic in the detail of each mental presentation, and therefore omits much. But it is not taken as a mental presentation at all, but as a content belonging to a systematic world of objects independent of my thought, and therefore stands for something which is not mere psychical image.

If therefore we are asked to display it as an image, as something fixed in a permanent outline, however pale or meagre, we cannot do so. It is not an abstract image, but a concrete habit or tendency. It can only be displayed in the judgment, that is, in a concrete case of reference to reality. Apart from this, it is a mere abstraction of analysis, a tendency to operate in a certain way upon certain psychical presentations. Psychically speaking, it is when realised in judgment a process more or less systematic, extending through time, and dealing with momentary presentations as its material. In other words, we may describe it as a selective rule, shown by its workings but not consciously before the mind--for if it were, it would no longer be an idea, but an idea of an idea.

Every judgment, whether made with language or without, {79} is an instance of such an idea, which may be called a symbolic idea as distinct from a psychical image; “symbolic” because the mental units or images involved are not as such taken as the whole of the object for which they stand, but are in a secondary sense, as the word in a primary sense, symbols or vehicles only.

Such ideas can have truth claimed for them, because they have a reference beyond their mental existence. They point to an object in a system of permanent objects, and that to which they point may or may not suit the relation which they claim for it. Therefore the judgment can only be made by help of symbolic ideas. Mere mental facts, occurrences in my mental history, taken as such, cannot enter into judgment. When we judge about them, as in the last sentence, they are not themselves subject or predicate, but are referred to, like any other facts, by help of a selective process dealing with our current mental images of them. We shall not be far wrong then, if in every judgment, under whatever disguises it may assume, we look for elements analogous to those which are manifest in the simple perceptive judgment, “This is green,” or “That is a horse.” The relation between these and more elaborate forms of affirmation, such as the abstract judgment of science, has partly been indicated in the earlier portion of this lecture. The general definition of judgment has therefore been sufficiently suggested on p. 72. Judgment is the reference of a significant idea to a subject in reality, by means of an identity of content between them.

{80}