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Judgement (or US spelling judgment) is also known as '' adjudication'', which means the
evaluation Evaluation is a systematic determination and assessment of a subject's merit, worth and significance, using criteria governed by a set of standards. It can assist an organization, program, design, project or any other intervention or initiative ...
of
evidence Evidence for a proposition is what supports this proposition. It is usually understood as an indication that the supported proposition is true. What role evidence plays and how it is conceived varies from field to field. In epistemology, eviden ...
to
make a decision In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be either rati ...
. Judgement is also the ability to make considered decisions. The term has at least five distinct uses.
Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical Greece, Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatet ...
suggested we think of the ''opposite'' of different uses of a term, if one exists, to help determine if the uses are really different. Some opposites will be included here to help demonstrate that their uses are really distinct: * Informal –
opinion An opinion is a judgment, viewpoint, or statement that is not conclusive, rather than facts, which are true statements. Definition A given opinion may deal with subjective matters in which there is no conclusive finding, or it may deal with ...
s expressed as facts. * Informal and
psychological Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betw ...
– used in reference to the quality of cognitive faculties and adjudicational capabilities of particular individuals, typically called ''
wisdom Wisdom, sapience, or sagacity is the ability to contemplate and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight. Wisdom is associated with attributes such as unbiased judgment, compassion, experiential self-knowled ...
'' or '' discernment''. The opposites are ''foolishness'' or ''indiscretion''. * Formal - the mental act of affirming or denying one thing of 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 legal
trial In law, a trial is a coming together of parties to a dispute, to present information (in the form of evidence) in a tribunal, a formal setting with the authority to adjudicate claims or disputes. One form of tribunal is a court. The tribun ...
, 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)#Spelling for further explanation. Additionally, judgement can mean: *
Personality judgment Personality judgment (or personality judgement in UK) is the process by which people perceive each other's personalities through acquisition of certain information about others, or meeting others in person. The purpose of studying personality judg ...
, a psychological phenomenon of a person forming opinions of other people.


Formal judgement

So, to put some of the definitions together, we might say that we use the ''power'' or ''faculty'' of judgement to ''render'' judgements in seeking ''understanding'' of 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, respectively. This opens the controversy, however, of whether habits can even be classified or studied scientifically as well as whether there is such a thing as
human nature Human nature is a concept that denotes the fundamental dispositions and characteristics—including ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—that humans are said to have naturally. The term is often used to denote the essence of humankind, or ...
. It may be possible to state provisionally, though, that if human nature exists, it exists in the powers or, stated another way, human ''potentialities''.


Judging power or faculty

Aristotle observed our power to judge took 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'', but also can in fact ''deny'' something, and 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'' definition. It should probably be noted that later Aristotelians, like Mortimer Adler, questioned whether "definitions of abstraction" that come from merging examples in one's mind are really analytically distinct from a judgement. So it might be cautioned that the mind may automatically tend to form a judgement upon having been given such examples.


Distinction of parts

In informal use, the words employed in the first main paragraph above are very often used with a great deal of overlap even when keeping them separated by the triad of power, act and habit. Past thinkers, like in the example just given, have made observations in an effort to separate them further to help define what is meant by "judgement". Aristotle also 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 look and 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, while 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 we might see "2 + 2 = 4" and call this statement derived from an arithmetical judgement true, but we would probably 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, we can see they are, in a sense, ''called'' terms because their objects are the final components that arise at the point where judgements, like in the case of the "judgement of separation" kind of judgements described in this example, must ''terminate'', 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 Jesus, likely from he, יֵשׁוּעַ, translit=Yēšūaʿ, label=Hebrew/Aramaic ( AD 30 or 33), also referred to as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth (among other names and titles), was a first-century Jewish preacher and religiou ...
warned about judging others in the
Sermon on the Mount The Sermon on the Mount (anglicized from the Matthean Vulgate Latin section title: ) is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth found in the Gospel of Matthew (chapters 5, 6, and 7). that emphasizes his moral teachings. It is ...
: ''Do not judge, or you too will be judged''. *The
Last Judgement The Last Judgment, Final Judgment, Day of Reckoning, Day of Judgment, Judgment Day, Doomsday, Day of Resurrection or The Day of the Lord (; ar, یوم القيامة, translit=Yawm al-Qiyāmah or ar, یوم الدین, translit=Yawm ad-Dīn, ...
is a significant concept in Christianity, Islam, Judaism and other world faiths.


See also

*
Bias Bias is a disproportionate weight ''in favor of'' or ''against'' an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individual, a group ...
*
Choice A choice is the range of different things from which a being can choose. The arrival at a choice may incorporate motivators and models. For example, a traveler might choose a route for a journey based on the preference of arriving at a given ...
*
Decree A decree is a legal proclamation, usually issued by a head of state (such as the president of a republic or a monarch), according to certain procedures (usually established in a constitution). It has the force of law. The particular term used f ...
* Discrimination *
Prejudice Prejudice can be an affect (psychology), affective feeling towards a person based on their perceived group membership. The word is often used to refer to a preconceived (usually unfavourable) evaluation or classification (disambiguation), classi ...
*
Presumption of guilt A presumption of guilt is any presumption within the criminal justice system that a person is guilty of a crime, for example a presumption that a suspect is guilty unless or until proven to be innocent. Such a presumption may legitimately aris ...
* :Judgment in Christianity *
General judgment General judgment is the Christian theological concept of a judgment of the dead. When the individual dies, general judgment holds that the person's final dispensation will await the general judgment of the dead at the end of the world, rather than ...
, a Christian theological concept * '' Judgment at Nuremberg'', a 1961 American courtroom drama


References


Further reading

*Zheng Wanga, ''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 ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Sc ...
'', v. 111, no. 26, pp. 9431–9436. {{Authority control Concepts in aesthetics