JUDGMENT, in logic and psychology, means an act of thought by which something is interpreted with the aid of some idea or concept already acquired. (Sometimes the term judgment is also used to denote the result of such an act of judging or thinking, and sometimes it is used to denote the capacity to judge.) Judgment is the unit of thought, and the most compli cated thinking consists of a synthesis of many judgments con nected by rational ties. To understand the nature of judgment it is perhaps best to regard it as intellectual orientation based on what has already been learned from past experience. There is an inferior kind of orientation and learning from experience which is more or less blind, merely instinctive, such as is found among the lower animals. At the intellectual level it becomes more or less clear-sighted and articulate. The lessons of past experience are retained in the form of ideas or concepts which can be ap plied to the interpretation of new situations, which thereby be come intelligible, and perhaps manageable. The object or situa
tion which needs interpretation is called the subject of the judgment ; the idea or concept by means of which it is interpreted is called the predicate; and the two, subject and predicate, are called the terms of the judgment. When thinking proceeds sys tematically so that one judgment, or group of judgments, is made the ground (q.v.) of another, then we are said to reason, and the derived judgment is called an inference or a conclusion. The verbal expression of a judgment is called a proposition. There are many different kinds of judgments, but as judgments can only be discussed by expressing them first in language, that is in the form of propositions, the subject is dealt with more fully under