Judgement and Truth in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology

M. Textor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137286321
• eBook ISBN: 9781137286338
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia analitica

What is judgement? is a question thathas exercised generations of philosophers. Early analytic philosophers (Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein) and phenomenologists (Brentano, Husserl and Reinach) changed how philosophers think about this question. This book explores and assesses their contributions and help us to retrace their steps.

1

Introduction

Mark Textor

King’s College, London

At the heart of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was the idea that judgement is the synthesis of representations into a unity. The synthesis model of judgement proved to be highly influential. Idealists on the continent and in Britain conceived of judgement as a unifying act. (On the latter see Preti’s paper, sect. 3.) However, the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century saw a major change in the theory of judgement. Both early analytic philosophers and phenomenologists aimed to overcome the synthesis view of judgement and to replace it with a different conception in which the notion of truth is central. The reconceptualisation of judgement shaped both the analytic and the phenomenological tradition in philosophy. This book aims bring the contributions of early analytic philosophers and phenomenologists to this development into focus.

Franz Brentano (1838–1917) was instrumental in dismantling the synthesis model of judgement. In his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) he argued that a judgement and an idea can represent the same thing in the same way. The difference between them resides entirely in the attitude towards the represented content. If I acknowledge or reject an object, I make a judgement:

The person who affirms, the person who negates and the person who asks with uncertainty have the same object in their consciousness; the last one in that he merely presents (vorstellt) it, the first one in that she presents it and simultaneously acknowledges (anerkennen) or rejects (verwerfen) it. (Brentano 1874 II: 289 [182]. My translation. References to the English translation in square brackets.)

One can acknowledge or reject an object without predicating properties to it, argued Brentano. Hence, judging is one thing, predicating another. Since predication is one important form of synthesis, Brentano strikes an important blow against the synthesis model of judgement. Importantly, judging is not predicating the property of being true or of being a fact to something:

If we say that every acknowledging judgement (anerkennende Urteil) is an act of taking something to be true, and every rejecting judgement an act of taking something to be false, this does not mean that the former consists in predicating truth of what is taken to be true and the latter in predicating falsity of what is taken to be false. […] what the expressions denote is a particular kind of intentional reception of an object, a distinctive kind of mental reference to a content of consciousness […]. (Brentano 1874 II: 89 [186–7]. In part my translation.)¹

Brentano’s view is a representative and influential example of a non-synthetic view of judgement. I will now use it to introduce the main questions raised by this new model of judgement.

Brentano took for granted that we know what acknowledging and rejecting is. Adolf Reinach (1883–1917), a student of Husserl and Lipps, targeted this assumption. (See Reinach 1911: 57 [316].) He distinguished between three main senses of ‘acknowledegment’ (‘rejection’) (We will soon see that there is a fourth):

(a) the evaluative sense of ‘acknowledgement’: when I approve or disapprove an action, I acknowledge or reject it in the evaluative sense.

(b) the assent sense of ‘acknowledgement’: when I assent to (concur with) a statement or judgement, I acknowledge or reject it in the assent sense.

(c) the positing sense of ‘acknowledgement’: when I come to the view that Socrates is wise, I assert or posit the wisdom of Socrates.

Different philosophers exploited different senses of ‘acknowledgement’ (‘rejection’) in their theories of judgement.

The Neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) opted for (a) and gave the key term ‘to acknowledge’ an evaluative twist:

[T]he truth-value is a value to be coordinated with the other values, according to which we approvingly embrace or disapprovingly reject the content of an idea. The disjunction of true and false, the alternative evaluative relation of the idea to the truth-value, is the psychologically fundamental fact of logic. (Windelband 1884: 174. My translation and emphasis.)

There are three ideas in this passage that are of importance for this introduction:

(i) Truth is a value. (Rickert described, in turn, falsity as a un-value (Unwert).)

(ii) Judgement is an evaluation with respect to the truth-value.

(iii) Judgement has an opposite: disapproving rejection.

Windelband’s (i) and (ii) were inspired by Lotze’s Logik. Lotze took the distinction between truth and falsity to be a distinction in value (Wertdifferenz). Logic is concerned with the question when ideas and thought have these values, psychology with the laws of connection between ideas. (See Lotze 1874 I (1912): 4f.)²

Brentano rejected the evaluative construal of ‘acknowledgement’. We value true judgements, but that does not make judgements evaluations. (See Brentano 1889: 39.) Hence, ‘acknowledgement’ should not be understood in the evaluative sense. In which sense, then, should it be understood? The term ‘acknowledgement’ is suggestive, but it needed further elucidation to be useful in the theory of judgement. I will come back to this demand for further elucidation in a moment.

Brentano’s view also gave rise to questions about the objects of judgement. Reinach remarked:

According to them [Brentano and his disciples] any object can be judged, that is, acknowledged or rejected, a tree or a tone or something else. (Reinach 1911: 78. My translation.)

But what could it mean to judge a tone or judge a tree? Reinach, in turn, held that only states of affairs like the tree’s greenness (the tone’s clarity) can be judged. Basic states of affairs are conceived of as complexes of objects and properties. We will re-encounter them in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

We can now use our outline of Brentano’s non-synthetic view of judgement and its problems to introduce the contributions collected in this book.

The German Logician Sigwart (1830–1904) asked Brentano a hard question about negative judgement: ‘What is it that we reject when we reject something in judgement?’ If we reject an object, it must exist. Hence, every rejection seems to be manifestly false. Arianna Betti’s ‘We owe it to Sigwart! A New Look at the Content/Object Distinction in Early Phenomenological Theories of Judgement from Brentano to Twardowski’ essay assesses the answers Brentano and his followers Hillebrand, Marty and Twardowski gave. Developing these answers made it necessary to distinguish between the content of a judgement and its object. Betti’s essay gives the reader a new historical perspective on this important and now widely accepted distinction.

Wayne Martin’s contribution ‘Theodor Lipps and the Psycho-Logical Theory of Judgement’ explores a concept of ‘acknowledgement’ that was missing on our list from (a) to (c): if you have a justified legal demand that concerns me, I ought to acknowledge it. Theodor Lipps (1851–1914) used this legal notion of acknowledgement as his model of judgement. An object (or better: a fact) makes a demand on me. If I acknowledge the demand made, I judge that the object is a certain way. Lipps’s suggestion seems to latch on to an essential feature of judgement: in judgement we passively take in a fact. Martin’s essay carefully analyses Lipp’s view of judgement and explores its philosophical potential.

The notion of acknowledgement is not only used by phenomenologists. It also figured prominently in early analytic philosophy. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), the ‘grandfather of analytic philosophy’ (Dummett), takes judgement to be indefinable, but he elucidates this notion by saying that judgement is acknowledgement of the truth of a thought. How should one understand Frege’s use (of the German synonym) of ‘acknowledgement’?

Its negative import is clear. Kant distinguished between problematic and assertoric judgements; a ‘problematic’ judgement is merely grasping a thought with consideration of its truth suspended. (See Kant 1781/87: A76/B 101.) Frege used ‘acknowledgement’ to make clear that he is not talking about merely grasping a truth-evaluable representation. In judgement we take a stand on the truth of such a representation; we acknowledge its truth.

Can one characterise acknowledgement further? Gottfried Gabriel argues in his ‘Truth, Value, and Truth Value. Frege’s Theory of Judgement and its Historical Background’ that Frege’s use of acknowledgement is inspired by Neo-Kantians like Windelband and Rickert. As we have just seen, Windelband takes acknowledgement and hence judgement to be an evaluation. In judgement we evaluate a proposition with respect to the value True. Gabriel draws our attention to parallels between Frege’s and the Neo-Kantians’ work on judgement. According to Gabriel, Windelband goes beyond Frege and motivates the introduction of a third truth-value.

Wolfgang Künne’s ‘Merely Entertaining a Thought, Judging and Asserting. Notes on a Passage in Frege’s ‘The Thought’’ is also devoted to Frege. The essay is an in-depth exegesis of a pregnant passage in Frege’s late paper ‘Thoughts’ (1918). Systematically, the essay clarifies Frege’s concepts of grasping, judging and asserting. Künne argues on the basis of his exegesis that Frege’s text does not support an evaluative reading of Frege’s acknowledgement theory of judgement.

Frege’s paper ‘Negation’ (1919) put forth arguments for the conclusion that negation resides exclusively in the realm of thought and not in the realm of our attitudes we have towards thoughts. Denying that p is is the same act as asserting that not-p. Hence, one only needs the notion of judgement (assertion) as a primitive in logic. Denial can be defined in terms of assertion and is not ‘on all fours’ with it. These arguments convinced many later analytic philosophers that the notion of negative judgement was not needed in logic. In contrast, Brentano held that just as one can love or hate an object, one can acknowledge or reject it. He took rejection ‘to be on all fours’ with acknowledgement. Not all of Brentano’s students followed him in this point and a fruitful debate ensued. The Brentanians were primarily concerned with the psychological plausibility of a sui generis act of rejection, and not, like Frege, with the question whether such an act is indispensable in logic. Kevin Mulligan’s ‘Acceptance, Acknowledgment, Affirmation, Agreement, Assertion, Belief, Certainty, Conviction, Denial, Judgment, Refusal and Rejection’ is organised around the question whether judgement has a polar opposite. He devotes a section of his essay to the most comprehensive discussion of this question in the Brentano school, Adolf Reinach’s ‘On the Theory of Negative Judgement’ (1911). Phenomenologists such as Husserl, Reinach and Stein distinguished and described a wealth of mental acts that are closely related to judgement. Mulligan surveys and discusses these analyses.

We are now ready to cross the Channel to Britain. Maria van der Schaar’s ‘G. F. Stout and Russell’s Earliest Account of Judgement’ portrays G. F. Stout (1860–1944) as a link between Brentano and Russell. Stout’s own work was inspired by Brentano, and Stout promoted the Brentanian acknowledgement view of judgement in Cambridge. van der Schaar’s essay adds to our understanding of Russell’s philosophical development and sheds new light both on Russell and Stout.

Stout also influenced Moore. Stout, and indirectly Brentano, therefore figure both prominently in Preti’s ‘The Origin and Influence of G. E. Moore’s ‘The Nature of Judgment’. Preti’s contribution is a detailed historical and philosophical analysis of Moore’s shift from an idealistic view of judgement to one which takes mind-independent propositions to be the constituents of reality. It looks back at Moore’s philosophical roots in British Idealism as well as forward to the influence of Moore’s theory of judgement on Russell.

Nic Damnjanovic and Stewart Candlish’s ‘The Myth of the Coherence Theory of Truth’ is, in part, concerned with Moore and Russell’s revolt against British Idealism. However, they argue for the surprising conclusion that this revolt missed in part its target. The coherence theory of truth was allegedly part and parcel of the philosophy of British Idealists. The standard history of analytic philosophy has it that Russell dismantled this theory and replaced it with a correspondence theory of truth. According to Damnjanovic and Candlish, the coherence theory of truth was a straw man. Idealists such as Bradley were committed to an identity theory of truth, not to a coherence theory. Even upon further investigation coherence theories of truth prove elusive. There seem to be none.

As we have seen, early analytic philosophers and phenomenologists disagreed about the nature of judgement. (Is it evaluative or not? Does it have an opposite?) They also disagreed about the nature of the second relatum. (Is it a thought, a state of affairs or a particular?) But that judgement is a two-place relation between a thinker and one other object was not questioned. Russell’s revolutionary contribution to the theory of judgement was to propose that judgement is a multiple relation. For example, my judgement that Romeo loves Juliet is a relation between me, Romeo, Love and Juliet – very roughly, in making this judgement I take Romeo, Love and Juliet to be related. If judgement is a multiple relation, propositions or states of affairs are no longer needed as relata of the judgement relation. Hence, Russell did not need an answer to the puzzling question ‘What unifies Romeo, Love and Juliet to a proposition if Romeo does not love Juliet?’ However, Wittgenstein showed that this move resulted in another problem: ‘What prevents a thinker from judging nonsense (for example, that Love Romeo Juliet) if judgement is a multiple relation?’ The debate between Russell and Wittgenstein about the nature of judgement was one of the highlights of early analytic philosophy. Two contributions in this book are devoted to it.

Fraser MacBride’s ‘The Russell–Wittgenstein Dispute: A New Perspective’ provides a historical reconstruction of the debate be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Mark Textor: Introduction
• 2 Wayne Martin: Theodor Lipps and the Psycho-Logical Theory of Judgement
• 3 Gottfried Gabriel: Truth, Value, and Truth Value. Frege’s Theory of Judgement and its Historical Background
• 4 Wolfgang Künne: Merely Entertaining a Thought, Judging and Asserting. Notes on a Passage in Frege’s ‘The Thought’
• 5 Arianna Betti: We Owe It To Sigwart! A New Look at the Content/Object Distinction in Early Phenomenological Theories of Judgment from Brentano to Twardowski
• 6 Kevin Mulligan: Acceptance, Acknowledgment, Affirmation, Agreement, Assertion, Belief, Certainty, Conviction, Denial, Judgment, Refusal and Rejection
• 7 Maria van der Schaar: G.F. Stout and Russell’s Earliest Account of Judgement
• 8 Nic Damnjanovic and Stewart Candlish: The Myth of the Coherence Theory of Truth
• 9 Consuelo Preti: The Origin and Influence of G.E. Moore’s ‘The Nature of Judgment’
• 10 Fraser McBride: The Russell–Wittgenstein Dispute: A New Perspective
• 11 Hans-Johann Glock: Judgement and Truth in the Early Wittgenstein
• Index