The Essentials of Logic, Being Ten Lectures on Judgment and Inference

by Bernard Bosanquet

(c) These are two properties of the Judgment, but they do not tell us what it is. We shall of course examine its nature more fully in the later lectures. At present we need only think of it as affirmation. This may be simply described as “pronouncing the interpretation of our perceptions to form one system with the data of our perceptions.” We may at once admit the distinction between data and interpretation to be only relative. Its relativity is the consequence of the constructed or so to speak artificial {28} character of our real world. We can get at no data unqualified by judgment.

We may take as an example our perception of things in space. How much of what we see is given in present sense-perception? This is a question to which there is no definite answer. We do not know what the presentations of vision were like before we had learnt to see as a fully conscious human being sees. We have no right to assume, that after we have learned to see in this way the actual sense-presentation remains the same as it was in a different stage of our visual education. We can give no precise meaning in the way of a time-limit to the presentness of perception. But we know this much, that it takes a long time and many kinds of experience to learn to see as an educated human being sees, and that this acquired capacity is never at a stand-still, but is always being extended or diminished according to the vitality, growth, or atrophy of our apperceptive masses. There is always a certain element of amplification or interpretation, which by experience, or attentive introspection we can eliminate from the data, apparently forced upon us by reality, although these data themselves are modified through and through both by habitual interpretation, and by the very defining attention which aims at eliminating all amplification from them.

But yet the whole of sense-perception has a peculiar quality in being present. Artificial though it is, it yet, relatively speaking, contains an irreducible datum. It is distinguishable from everything which is not present. It is pervaded by something which we cannot reduce to {29} intellectual relation, though if we withdrew from it all that is relation, the apparent datum would be gone.

Now Knowledge is the affirmation or judgment which identifies the constructive interpretation of our present perception with the reality which present perception forces upon us. This is clear enough to begin with, but will have to be modified below to suit the more circuitous or mediate types of Judgment.

I take two examples, one from sight and one from sound.

Here is a table. In common language we should all say, “We see that is a table.” The expression is quite correct, because human seeing is a judgment. But yet, if you were asked to reduce your perception to terms of sight pure and simple—I mean of visual sensation—why, unless you were an analytic psychologist or a very skilful artist, you would not be able to do it. To speak of one point only, you would have to eliminate the attribute of depth and distance. That is all, so far as mere vision is concerned, your theory and your interpretation. The problem for an artist is to get back, at his high plane of perceptive power, to what in theory would be the lower plane. He has to re-translate his perception of a thing in space into a flat coloured surface. The difference between his flat picture and a real object in space is a rough measure of the difference made by interpretation or implication in the datum of sense-perception when we say, judging by sight only, “That is a table.” All the experiences of touch and motion, from which we have learned to perceive the solidity of the object, are, theoretically speaking, put into the judgment by us. They are not given by the eye alone, although we cannot now {30} separate them from that which is given by the eye alone. For the artist’s flat picture, which I used as an illustration, is not a stage in our visual education. Our visual education has proceeded pari passu with our education by touch and motion; and we saw objects in space as solids, long before we reflected that for the eye alone a coloured surface would naturally appear as flat. [1]

[1] The view that depth is a visual datum in the same sense as breadth seems to me in flagrant contradiction with experience. But for our present purpose the question is only one of degree, as no one maintains, that either depth or breadth are seen without education as an adult sees them.

But this impossibility of getting at an original datum only shows how entirely we are right in saying that our world is constructed by judgment. For the process of interpretative amplification passes quite continuously from the unconscious to the conscious; and every definitely expressed judgment, though perfectly homogeneous with the processes which have qualified its datum, and though it may fall wholly within the maximum of what in ordinary parlance we should call a simple given perception, contains an identification of some ideal element, enlargement, or interpretation, with that relatively given element which reveals itself through a peculiar quality of presentness pervading the “given” perception.

In the example “That is a table,” the unity of judgment is so well shown that the identification becomes almost unreal. In fact, we never judge except to satisfy an interest and so simple a judgment used as an example, apart from any context which could explain the need for it, has an air of unreality. You may hear a child make such a judgment {31} constantly in the sheer pleasure of recognition. An adult would never make it explicitly unless in some particular context; but it is made, as I shall maintain below, by the mere glance of his eye which takes in the table as a real object in a real world of space. Its appearance to the eye is in this case the datum, while the interpretation consists in construing this appearance as a solid individual existence in space.

We will look at an example in which the discrimination of elements is easier. Take the affirmation, “That is a cab,” assuming it to be made from merely hearing a sound. In this we can much more nearly separate the datum or minimum of sense from our enlargement or interpretation of it, and we know that our interpretation is liable to be wrong; that is to say, the reality into which we ought to construe the sound may be some other kind of vehicle, and not a cab. Now compare this with the affirmation, “That (which I see) is a cab.” This judgment of sight-perception, though its terms are more inextricably interwoven, has just the same elements in it as the judgment of sound-perception, “That (which I hear) is a cab.” In the sound-perception the structure is quite plain. A particular complex quality in the sound suggests as its objective explanation, what is perfectly distinguishable from it in thought, the movement of a cab on a particular kind of pavement. The quality of the sound, its roughness, loudness, increase and decrease, all form points of connection with the sound of a cab as we know it, and with the speed, weight, etc. of such a vehicle. But it is quite easy to consider the sound in itself apart from its interpretation, and we sometimes feel the {32} interpretation to be more immediate, and sometimes more inferential. We sometimes say, “I hear a cab,” just as we say, “I see one,” but in case of sound we more often perhaps say, “That sounds like—” such and such a thing, which indicates a doubt, and the beginning of conscious inference.