Judgment

Judgment is the capability to make sense of relationships among terrain and mental maps – your own and others’ – and what they mean for what you do.

You exercise judgment when you apprehend conditions, make sense of them, anticipate what might happen, and decide how to act. Drawing on experience, knowledge, expectations, purposes, and dispositions, judgment can be quick and confident without requiring conscious deliberation. Exercising better judgment means understanding what you’re relying on, how well it fits the situation, and what authority to give it in deciding what to do. That might confirm or change your initial judgment. It doesn’t necessarily require more time or information, but judgment can be sharpened through reflection and experience.

Philosophically, judgment has a long association with practical wisdom – discerning what matters in particular circumstances and acting well within it. Aristotle called this phronesis. Immanuel Kant illuminated another aspect of judgment – rules cannot tell us everything about when and how to apply them. If applying a rule required another rule, we’d need yet another to apply that one, and so on without end. Kant argued that judgment cannot be learned through rules alone; it must be exercised, and practice and examples can sharpen it.