Synthetic judgment

“ When we compare a part of a concept with another concept, the process is analytic. When we compare concepts equal in rank or extent, the process is neither synthetic nor analytic. Thus in the statement that: "A horse is an animal," the judgment is synthetic; in the statement that: "some animals are horses," the judgement is analytic; in the statement that: "a man is a rational animal," the judgment is neither analytic nor synthetic.
Brooks says: "In one sense all judgments are synthetic. A judgment consists of the union of two ideas and this uniting is a process of synthesis. ”

“ The truth of the last proposition does not follow from the truth of the preceding ones.
[Pg 187]
§ II.—Relation of Judgment and Reasoning.
Judgment Synthetic, Reasoning Analytic.—The relation of judgment and reasoning to each other becomes evident from what has been said of the nature of the reasoning process. Judgment is essentially synthetic. Reasoning, essentially analytic. The former combines, affirms one thing to be true of another; the latter divides, declares one truth to be contained in another. All reasoning involves judgment, but all judgment is not reasoning. ”

“ It is easy to understand how near the temptation lies, in the case of such knowledge of a general truth without any induction from single cases otherwise demanded in truths of experience, entirely to overlook the preparatory experience of a feeling having the character of rightness, and to regard the universal judgment as an immediate synthetic à priori form of knowledge. ”

“ But if we understand ‘analytic’ in the sense just defined, namely, what is proved by the law of contradiction alone, it is plain that, if ‘synthetic’ means what is not proved by this alone, no truth can be both analytic and synthetic. ”

“ But, though a judgment is always a complex unity, the extent of this complexity seems at first sight to vary as the form of Law of Dichotomy or Duality. synthesis varies. Formal logic, as we have seen, by throwing the form of synthesis into the predicate has no difficulty in reducing every judgment to an S is P. But, if we at all regard the matter thought, it is certain, for example, that “It is an explosion” is less complex than “The enemy explodes the mine.” ”

“ No matter what show of logic may drive us into the corner, our instinctive moral sense prohibits us from entertaining the theorem that the single self who conducts the argument, albeit he is its cause, its designer, its engineer, and its authority, is the sole and absolute Reality, — the only being in existence having such compass, such sovereign judgment, such self-determining causality. ”

“ On every decision on a question of right or wrong, a train of mental action is called into operation, comparing the ideas already in the mind with the facts of the case under review, and noting the similarity of these facts to our idea of right, or whether the facts conform to our idea of wrong. This decision we call judgment: but when the decision reaches to the question of right or wrong, touching our own conduct only, logicians have agreed to call it conscience; not a distinct action from judgment—much less a distinct faculty ”

“ All that is physically requisite to their operation is that they should be vividly represented; while all that is requisite rationally, to justify them in qualifying actual life by their influence, is that the present act should have some tendency to bring the represented values about. In other words, a rational mind would consider, in its judgment and action, every interest which that judgment or action at all affected ”

“ All those of our judgments which have the character of universality and necessity, acquire it only by virtue of our psychological organisation. In those cases where we are particularly convinced of the objective value of our judgment, we have merely to do with a purely subjective certainty, though it is immutable and secure in the visible world. ”

“ Since then one cannot prefer one idea to another, either without a proof and a criterion or with them, the ideas that differ according to different conditions cannot be judged, so that the suspension of judgment in regard to the nature of external objects follows through this Trope also. ”

“ It is plain that in the final analysis any question on which we reserve our judgment is a problem which we put into our minds. And, after all, it is only a question of degree and affectivity between the state of mind which hesitates to decide an impersonal question, like a judicial decision, and one that involves a scruple of conscience. ”

“ Let us see how, in these special classes of cases, we shall succeed in verifying the natural presupposition of common sense, which regards error as possible only when our object is not wholly present to mind, and which assumes that a judgment can have an object that is yet only partially present to mind. In choosing the classes of cases, we shall first follow common sense as to their definition. We shall take just the assumptions of daily life, and shall show that they lead us into difficulty. We are not for the first bound to explain why these assumptions are made. ”

“ Of how great a multitude of intellectual relations does a scientific or even an artistic judgment imply the coincidence and concurrent action! And yet these are merely private judgments, which involve an assenting feeling in the individual, but beyond that can not pretend to any valid authority. In practical life the judicial function in the state alone furnishes an adequate standard for estimating the high rank which the faculty of judgment holds as the center of the human consciousness. ”

“ The result will reward the toil.
When we undertake to express the objective validity of any truth, we use Judgments. These judgments, if subjectively regarded, — that is, if viewed merely as processes of our own present thinking, whose objects are external to themselves, — involve, in all their more complex forms, combinations of ideas, — devices whereby we weave already present ideas into more manifold structures, thereby enriching our internal meanings. But the act of judgment has always its other — its objective aspect. The ideas, when we judge, are also to possess external meanings. ”

“ The point is whether with every judgment we do not find an aspect of existence, absent from the predicate but present in the subject, and whether in the synthesis of these aspects we have not got the essence of judgment. ”

“ In fact, synthesis takes place wherever we grasp the bearing of facts on a conclusion, or of a principle on facts. As analysis is emphasis, so synthesis is placing; the one causes the emphasized fact or property to stand out as significant; the other gives what is selected its context, or its connection with what is signified. Every judgment is analytic in so far as it involves discernment, discrimination, marking off the trivial from the important, the irrelevant from what points to a conclusion ”

“ For example, the sensible, for we shall limit the argument first to this—Is it to be judged by sensible or by intellectual standards? For if it is to be judged by a sensible one, since we are in doubt about the sensible, that will also need something else to sustain it; and if that proof is also something sensible, something else will again be necessary to prove it, and so on in infinitum. If, on the contrary, the sensible must be judged by something 172 intellectual, as there is disagreement in regard to the intellectual, this intellectual thing will require also judgment and proof. ”

“ In judging of general propositions, we make use of our pre-conceptions, or universal principles, as criteria, or measures of judgment. The first impressions from the senses produce in the mind an involuntary emotion; but a wise man afterwards deliberately examines them, that he may know whether they be true or false, and assents to, or rejects them, as the evidence which offers itself to his understanding appears sufficient or insufficient. ”

“ But one who admits this fact as respects a practical judgment can no longer claim that it is fatal to the very idea of judgment to suppose that its proper object is some difference to be brought about in things, and that the truth of the judgment is constituted by the differences in consequences actually made. ”

“ The reflective judgment has as its principle the unity of particularity and the abstract universal of the understanding, the idea of a legal necessity which is at the same time free, or of a freedom which is directly one with its content. ”

“ In every thing ascribed to the Ego, the contrary, by virtue of this simple opposition, must be ascribed to the non Ego.—As we obtained from the first principle Ego = Ego, the logical law of identity, so now we have, from the second sentence Ego is not = non-Ego, the logical law of contradiction. And metaphysically,—since we wholly abstract the definite act of judgment, and, simply in the form of sequence, conclude not-being from opposite being,—we possess from this second principle the category of negation. ”

“ But why spoil the further mental analysis of inference by supposing that conceptions are constituents of judgment and therefore of inference, which thus becomes merely a complex combination of conceptions, an extension of ideas? The mistake has been to convert three operations of mind into three processes in a fixed order—conception, judgment, inference. Conception and judgment are decisions: inference alone is a process, from decisions to decision, from judgments to judgment. Sense, not conception, is the origin of judgment. ”

“ If our motive principle is to operate with clearness and logical consequence it must set up a definite standard. A test principle of judgment must be established that will furnish guidance in individual cases by enabling us to infer consequences from it in instances where simple, instinctive feeling fails. ”

“ Optimum "understanding" requires that a judgment be made, and that, in turn, requires two minds—not a fusion of identity. There must be one to judge and another to be judged, and each mind plays both roles. ”

“ And the only possible answer is that, whether true or false, it implies both a proposition as to the degree of goodness of the action in question, as compared with other things, and a number of causal propositions. For it cannot be denied that the action will have consequences: and to deny that the consequences matter is to make a judgment of their intrinsic value, as compared with the action itself. In asserting that the action is the best thing to do, we assert that it together with its consequences presents a greater sum of intrinsic value than any possible alternative. ”

“ The Materialist, admitting all this, may say that a judgment is only the proximate meaning of a proposition, and that the ultimate meaning, the meaning of the judgment itself, is always some matter-of-fact; that the other schools have not hitherto been eager to recognise the unity of Deduction and Induction or to investigate the conditions of trustworthy experiments and observations within the limits of human understanding ”

“ If the sensuous instinct only produces accidents, the formal instinct gives laws, laws for every judgment when it is a question of knowledge, laws for every will when it is a question of action. Whether, therefore, we recognize an object or conceive an objective value to a state of the subject, whether we act in virtue of knowledge or make of the objective the determining principle of our state; in both cases we withdraw this state from the jurisdiction of time, and we attribute to it reality for all men and for all time, that is, universality and necessity. ”

“ My judgment, then, is not merely a judgment about my own psychology: but, if so, about whose psychology is it a judgment? It cannot be a judgment that all men desire the one state more than the other; because that would include the judgment that I myself do so, which, as we have seen, I often know to be false, even while I judge that the one state really is better. And it cannot, I think, be a judgment merely about the feelings or desires of an impartial spectator in my own society ”

“ That all truth is harmonious is the postulate of reasoning, the denial of which would abolish all tests of truth and falsehood, and so make all judgment unmeaning. And since the two propositions are, as we have seen throughout this paper, incompatible as they stand in their immediacy, the only way in which they can possibly be made compatible is by a synthesis which unites by transcending them. ”

“ But the usual supposition at the outset is that any judgment has by itself its own object, so that thereby alone, apart from other judgments, it stands or falls. And thus far we have tried to show that this natural supposition leads us into difficulty. We cannot see how a single sincere judgment should possibly fail to agree with its own chosen object. But enough of our problem in general. ”

“ At the same time we recognise that these are ideals, to which in actual experience we never find more than an approximation, for we never discover in any really existing thing or act absolute equality, or justice, or goodness. In other words, any act of judgment on our part of actual experiences consists in a measuring of these experiences by standards which we give or apply to them, and which no number of experiences can give to us because they do not possess or exemplify them. ”

“ Now if the same things act upon different men differently, on account of the difference in the men, for this cause also suspension of the judgment may reasonably be introduced, and we may perhaps say how each object appears to us, and what its individual differences are, but we shall not be able to declare what it is as to the nature of its essence. ”

“ Another objection will be made against us, that we prohibit decisions, and the laying down of certain principles, till we arrive regular ly at generalities by the intermediate steps, and thus keep the judgment in suspense and lead to uncertainty. But our object is not uncertainty, but fitting certainty, for we derogate not from the senses, but assist them, and despise not the understanding, but direct it. ”