Judgement

Illustration of a judge evaluating evidence in court to make a judgement

Judgement (or judgment)[1] is the evaluation of given circumstances to make a decision or form an opinion. It may also refer to the result of such an evaluation, or to the ability of someone to make good judgements.[2]

In an informal context, a judgement may refer to an opinion expressed as fact. In logic, judgements assert the truth of statements. In the context of a legal trial, a judgement is a final finding, statement or ruling, based on evidence, rules and precedents, called adjudication (see Judgment (law)). In the context of psychology, judgment informally references the quality of a person's cognitive faculties and adjudicational capabilities, typically called wisdom. In formal psychology, judgement and decision making (JDM) is a cognitive process by which individuals reason, make decisions, and form opinions and beliefs.[3][4]

## Contents

* 1 Judgements in law
* 1.1 Etymology and origin
* 2 Judgement in cognitive science and psychology
* 2.1 Judgement in psychology
* 2.2 Judgement in neuroscience
* 3 Judgement in ethics
* 3.1 Moral and conventional judgements
* 4 Judgement in philosophy
* 4.1 Aristotle
* 4.1.1 Judging power or faculty
* 4.1.2 Distinction of parts
* 4.2 Kant
* 5 Judgement in religion
* 5.1 Abrahamic religions
* 5.1.1 Christianity
* 5.1.2 Islam
* 5.2 Other religions
* 6 See also
* 7 References
* 8 Further reading

## Judgements in law

This section is an excerpt from Judgment (law)[ edit ]

### Etymology and origin

The scales of justice, a common symbol of legal judgement held by Lady Justice

The term "judgment" derives from Latin iudicare ("to judge"), entering English via the Old French term jugement around the 13th century. It initially defined both legal trials and eschatological concepts like Judgment Day. In English law, judgments began as medieval writs that evolved to court decisions, which was interspersed with gradual inventions like summary judgment, which originated in 19th-century equity courts to resolve undisputed debt claims efficiently. These were later codified in systems like the U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (1938). This mechanism allows the dismissal of meritless claims.[5][6][7]

## Judgement in cognitive science and psychology

Main article: Decision-making

### Judgement in 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, probabilistic 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.

Research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the 1970s and 1980s identified psychological heuristics, such as the availability heuristic and anchoring, which often lead to predictable cognitive biases. Their theory formalized how people evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point, predicting loss aversion (valuing losses twice as much as equivalent gains). This has applications in behavioral economics and the design of policies. Kahneman's later works, including Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), distinguish "System 1" (intuitive judgements) from "System 2" (deliberative judgements).[8][9]

### Judgement in neuroscience

Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience have mapped judgement processes to brain regions like the prefrontal cortex, often examining how intuitive decisions are processed, as shown in fMRI studies of risk assessment. In artificial intelligence, large language models (e.g., GPT-4) replicate human judgement biases such as loss aversion and the gambler's fallacy. This raises concerns for judicial prediction, though they improve accuracy in planned tasks.[10][11][12]

## Judgement in ethics

Ethical judgment involves evaluating actions, intentions, or outcomes against moral norms, distinguishing it from prudential assessments. Philosophers debate whether such judgements are objective (grounded in reason) or subjective (relational), which has been the influence of theories such as deontology and virtue ethics.

### Moral and conventional judgements

A major distinction, traced to Jean Piaget and refined by Elliot Turiel, separates moral judgements (concerning harm, fairness, rights; e.g., "stealing is wrong regardless of rules") from conventional judgements (rules, context-dependent; e.g., "uniforms are required in school"). This idea, supported by cultural developmental psychology, posits morals as universal, while conventions are arbitrary. This conception aids explanations for why children follow moral rules more rigidly.[13]

In Kantian ethics, moral judgements derive from the categorical imperative, creating universalizable axioms via practical reason, distinct from hypothetical imperatives of skill or wisdom. Critics like Hegel viewed such judgements as historically mediated, evolving through the general ethical views of the population.[14]

## Judgement in philosophy

Main articles: Philosophy:Epistemology and Criteria of truth

### Aristotle

#### Judging power or faculty

Aristotle observed that the ability 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 deny 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.[15]

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.[16]

#### Distinction of parts

In informal use, words like "judgement" are often used imprecisely.[17] Aristotle observed that while propositions can be drawn from judgements and called "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 "apt" or "inapt".[18]

### Kant

Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), positioned judgement as the core of human cognition, defining it as a conscious mental operation that is the base of the conceptualization of objects via intuition. Kant's anti-psychologistic ideas emphasize judgement unifying cognitive capabilities for objective validity. "Determining" judgements subsume particulars under universals while "reflective" judgements seek universals for given particulars.[19]

## Judgement in religion

### Abrahamic religions

Main article: Religion:Last Judgment

The Last Judgment is a concept originating in Zoroastrianism and found across the Abrahamic religions.[20][21]

The Last Judgment by Michelangelo, an artistic depiction of divine discernment in Christianity

#### Christianity

In Christianity, the New Testament addresses interpersonal judgement in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus states: "Do not judge, or you too will be judged" (Matthew 7:1, NIV), cautioning against hypocritical condemnation.[22]

#### Islam

In Islam, judgment manifests as Yawm al-Qiyamah (Day of Judgment), where Allah resurrects all souls for accountability based on deeds recorded in the Kitab (book of records), determining paradise or hell, showing mercy alongside justice (Quran 99:7–8).[23]

### Other religions

Hinduism views judgement as a function of karma, the law of cause and effect where actions (samskaras) influence rebirth (samsara) and ultimate liberation (moksha), with texts like the Bhagavad Gita portraying it as self-operated moral consequence, not divine intervention.[23]

Similarly, Buddhism merges judgement via Right View (Pali: sammā diṭṭhi) in the Noble Eightfold Path, stressing the discernment of ethical actions as a means to break the cycle of rebirth and attain nirvana, as taught in the Dhammapada.[23]

## See also

* Medicine:Unconditional positive regard - Concept in psychotherapy

## References

1. ↑ "judgement". 19 May 2016. https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/judgement/.
2. ↑ "Judgement | Judgment, n.". 2024. doi:10.1093/OED/1148975534. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/judgement_n.
3. ↑ Keren, Gideon, ed (2015). The Wiley Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-118-46839-5.
4. ↑ Sternberg, Robert J.; Sternberg, Karin (2017). Cognitive psychology (Seventh ed.). Boston: Cengage Learning. ISBN 978-1-305-64465-6.
5. ↑ "Judgment - Etymology, Origin & Meaning" (in en-US). https://www.etymonline.com/word/judgment.
6. ↑ "The History and Evolution of Summary Judgment". https://legalhusk.com/civil-litigation/the-history-and-evolution-of-summary-judgment.
7. ↑ Bauman, John A. "The Evolution of the Summary Judgment Procedure: An Essay Commemorating the Centennial Anniversary of Keating." Indiana Law Journal, vol. 31, no. 3, 1956, pp. 329–347.
8. ↑ Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. "Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases." Science, vol. 185, no. 4157, 27 September 1974, pp. 1124–1131.
9. ↑ Kahneman, Daniel. "A Perspective on Judgment and Choice: Mapping Bounded Rationality". American Psychologist, vol. 58, no. 9, Sept. 2003, pp. 697–720.
10. ↑ Mineo, Liz (2025-11-13). "Is AI dulling our minds?" (in en-US). https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/is-ai-dulling-our-minds/.
11. ↑ Smith, Ashley. "AI Thinks Like Us: Flaws, Biases, and All, Study Finds." Neuroscience News, 1 Apr. 2025, neurosciencenews.com/ai-human-thinking-28535/.
12. ↑ Zhang, Ni; Zhang, Zixuan (2023). "The application of cognitive neuroscience to judicial models: recent progress and trends". Frontiers in Neuroscience 17. doi:10.3389/fnins.2023.1257004. ISSN 1662-4548. PMID 37811324.
13. ↑ Machery, Edouard; Stich, Stephen (2022), Zalta, Edward N., ed., "The Moral/Conventional Distinction", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/moral-conventional/, retrieved 2025-12-13
14. ↑ Johnson, Robert; Cureton, Adam (2025), Zalta, Edward N.; Nodelman, Uri, eds., "Kant’s Moral Philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2025/entries/kant-moral/, retrieved 2025-12-13
15. ↑ "The Internet Classics Archive | On Interpretation by Aristotle". https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/interpretation.1.1.html.
16. ↑ "Ten Philosophical Mistakes by Mortimer J. Adler" (in en-US). 2013-03-08. https://www.paulvitols.com/2013/03/ten-philosophical-mistakes-by-mortimer-j-adler/.
17. ↑ "Difference Between Perception and Judgement | Compare the Difference Between Similar Terms" (in en-US). Compare the Difference Between Similar Terms. https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-perception-and-vs-judgement/.
18. ↑ "Aristotle: Logic | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy" (in en-US). https://iep.utm.edu/aristotle-logic/.
19. ↑ Hanna, Robert (2022), Zalta, Edward N., ed., Kant's Theory of Judgment (Spring 2022 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/kant-judgment/, retrieved 10 December 2025
20. ↑ Wilfred Graves, Jr., In Pursuit of Wholeness: Experiencing God's Salvation for the Total Person (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2011), 9, 22, 74–5.
21. ↑ Boyce, Mary (1979), Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 27–29, ISBN 978-0-415-23902-8, https://books.google.com/books?id=a6gbxVfjtUEC .
22. ↑ Cottrell, Jack. Jack Cottrell's Questions and Answers. Orcutt Christian Church, n.d., https://www.orcuttchristian.org/Jack Cottrell_ Questions and Answers.pdf. Accessed 11 Dec. 2025.
23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 23.2 "Global Perspectives on Judgment – Interface" (in en-US). 27 January 2024. https://www.donweaver.org/global-perspectives-on-judgment/.

## Further reading

* Wanga, Zheng (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. doi:10.1073/pnas.1407756111. PMID 24979797. Bibcode: 2014PNAS..111.9431W.

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