Judgement (or judgment)
In an informal context, a judgement may refer to an opinion expressed as fact. In logic, judgements assert the truth of Proposition. 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 Mind 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.
Judgements in law
Etymology and origin
The term "judgment" derives from
Latin ("to judge"), entering English language via the Old French term around the 13th century. It initially defined both legal trials and
Eschatology concepts like
Last Judgment. In
English law, judgments began as medieval
Writ 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.
[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.]
Judgement in cognitive science and psychology
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
, 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 effect, 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 Policy. Kahneman's later works, including Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), distinguish "System 1" (intuitive judgements) from "System 2" (deliberative judgements).[Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. "Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases." Science, vol. 185, no. 4157, 27 September 1974, pp. 1124–1131.][Kahneman, Daniel. "A Perspective on Judgment and Choice: Mapping Bounded Rationality". American Psychologist, vol. 58, no. 9, Sept. 2003, pp. 697–720.]
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.
[Smith, Ashley. "AI Thinks Like Us: Flaws, Biases, and All, Study Finds." Neuroscience News, 1 Apr. 2025, neurosciencenews.com/ai-human-thinking-28535/.]
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 judgement (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.
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.
Judgement in philosophy
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.
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.
Distinction of parts
In informal use, words like "judgement" are often used imprecisely.
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".
Kant
Immanuel Kant, in his
Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and
Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), positioned judgement as the core of
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.
Judgement in religion
Abrahamic religions
The Last Judgment is a concept originating in
Zoroastrianism and found across the Abrahamic religions.
[Wilfred Graves, Jr., In Pursuit of Wholeness: Experiencing God's Salvation for the Total Person (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2011), 9, 22, 74–5.][.]
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" (, NIV), cautioning against hypocritical condemnation.
[Cottrell, Jack. Jack Cottrell's Questions and Answers
]
Accessed 11 Dec. 2025.
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).
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.
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.
See also
Further reading
