Autor: Flanagan, Josef

Buch: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Titel: Quest for Self-Knowledge

Stichwort: Urteil; privat - öffentlich; absolut und bedingt; Beispiel: Gericht; Urteil als Grundlage der Gemeinschaft; Galileo; das bedingte Absolute

Kurzinhalt: What is common to knowers is not that they have had the same experiences, but that they have asked the same question about their insights and ideas, ... Judging adds to your ideas the affirmation or negation, guilty or not guilty, true or false. However,

Textausschnitt: 22/5 Paradoxically, then, judgments are both very personal and very public. A person is judged to be guilty, not because the juror said so, but because the juror judged that there was sufficient evidence to assert that this person did in fact commit the crime. In this way, judgments are very private and personal, but they are also impersonal and objectively public. The juror is asserting that any other knower who examines the evidence will also find in that evidence a sufficient reason for making the same judgment. This means that if you tell the truth, no matter how personal or private that truth may be, it has a public, shareable dimension that transcends any particular person and permits other knowers to participate in, and to make their own commitment to, this same truth. Thus many knowers can belong to and share in the same true judgments. And, while each judgment is personal and private, still correct judgments are also impersonal and public. There can be one truth that provides the ground for many knowers to commit themselves to belong to that truth. (125f; Fs)

23/5 For example, Galileo's law of falling bodies and Newton's law of universal gravitation were discovered and verified by single knowers but they became the public property of a whole community of knowers. More surprising, Galileo and Newton have passed away but their judgments - insofar as they are correct - have perdured. What is this perduring public dimension of a correct judgment? (126; Fs)

24/5 What perdures is not the conditions under which the judgment was made, but the intelligibility that was apprehended and affirmed. What gets judged when you judge is whether you have understood things correctly. What is common to knowers is not that they have had the same experiences, but that they have asked the same question about their insights and ideas, namely, Are they correct? What every knower shares is the demand that emerges consciously and spontaneously with the question, Is it so? It pervades every conscious knower, setting up a demand for sufficient evidence to ground our prospective judgment. Thus that critical question, Is it so?, motivates thinkers to become judgers. For example, the knower as a judger might say. This is an impressive idea, but is it so? Judging adds to your ideas the affirmation or negation, guilty or not guilty, true or false. However, the yes or no by itself does not make sense. Without the what or why of the second level, there is nothing to judge. Judging, then, borrows from the first two levels the contents for which it finds 'sufficient evidence,' and so asserts, Yes, it is so, or No, it is not so. (126; Fs)

25/5 The simple yes or no may not seem significant, but it is important to notice what the judgment does to the synthesis of the first two levels. No longer is the synthesis a conditional synthesis, since it has been transformed through judging into an unconditional synthesis. The assertion, Yes, it is so, utters an absolute, and when you affirm unconditionally it is because you have grasped that the conditions have been given, as you have understood them to be given. This absolute is absolute only because the conditions are given. In other words, it is not a completely unconditioned absolute; rather, it is an absolute by virtue of its conditions having been given. It is a limited absolute. This discussion has treated the cognitional activity of judging in a general way. I would now like to consider two special forms of judging: common-sense judging and scientific judging. (126f; Fs)