The Types of Universals and the Forms of Judgment

• Author: Richard Dien Winfield
• Position: Distinguished Research Professor of philosophy at the University of Georgia
• Pages: 125-140

Page 125

The forms of judgment are widely recognized to be central to thinking and to knowing objectivity. Seldom, however, have the necessity, interrelation, and completeness of these forms been investigated. Although Kant can be credited for having brought them to center stage, he is notorious for failing to account for their diversity or for that of the categories he finds rooted in each form. As Kant himself would have to admit, assurances that judgment is found in certain shapes, relating terms through certain concepts, will not suffice for any universal claims for either thinking or objective knowledge. At best, what is culled from tradition or psychological observation can support corrigible descriptive claims of contingent local application.

To be conceived as such, independent of any conditional empirical content, judgment must not be considered in relation to any specific concepts that happen to be predicated of a subject. Instead, judgment must be examined in respect to the concept in general. Moreover, judgment per se must not predicate the concept in regard to any specific, contingently given subject. Rather, judgment, considered as such, must predicate the concept to the subject as such. To be logically rather than empirically determined, the subject can have no further content than the particular or the individual. These contents are themselves intrinsic to the concept. This is because the concept, logically speaking, is the universal, and the universal constitutively involves both the particular and the individual. Without differentiating itself through the particular, the universal cannot have its encompassing identity, whereas by being at one with itself in the particular, the universal engenders the individual, that which owes its differentiation to itself, enabling the particular to be distinguishable from other particulars, and the universal to be a one overPage 126 many.¹ Accordingly, judgment will constitutively relate these necessary elements of the concept -of universality- to one another. In determining the subject by the predicate to which it gets connected, judgment will accordingly determine the concept by its own elements, as related externally to one another through the immediate connection of the copula. This connection is immediate insofar as judgment relates subject and predicate by nothing but is, a connector providing no ground for its connection. By contrast, syllogism connects its extremes through the mediation of a middle term, which, logically speaking, must again be one of the elements of the concept.

If judgment necessarily takes particular shapes, these will be distinguished by which elements of the concept they connect, as well as by any generic types of universal, particular, and individual that distinguish each type of connection. No other differentiating factors are available without appealing to contingently given contents that have no legitimate place in logical investigation.

Consequently, if any categories are to emerge from the logical treatment of judgment, they will comprise the generic types of universality, particularity, and individuality, types whose necessity will reside in how they are ingredient in the different forms of judgment. To have any necessity of their own, these forms of judgment must themselves emerge from judgment per se. Otherwise, their differentiation will be rooted not in the nature of judgment, but in extraneous, accidental features.

For this reason, the logical investigation of judgment must begin with the universal determination of judgment, which comprises the minimal specification presupposed by any further forms that may be logically entailed. Although any such forms must emerge from this universal determination, once they do, it becomes differentiated as the initial shape of judgment, distinct from those that follow from it. Then, the universality, particularity, and individuality that figure within this initial shape become distinguished themselves as specific types of univer-sals, particulars, and individuals, externally related to one another by the type of copula with which judgment logically begins.Page 127

Significantly, these types of universals, particulars, and individuals, can be embodied in different types of reality and thought. Accordingly, any theory that privileges one type to the exclusion of the others will truncate thinking and conceptual knowledge. Such privileging will not only limit reason to a form of universality that is not exhaustive, but limit the application of thought to particular forms of reality, leaving others erroneously beyond rational conception. The forms of judgment thus need to be developed in their totality to liberate reason from the shortsighted truncations that have plagued all too much philosophy, past and present.

Among historical figures, Hegel stands out for attempting to account exhaustively and systematically for the forms of judgment. He purports to develop judgment from no further resource than the concept itself, following out how the universal, particular, and individual entail the external unification of universal and individual constitutive of the subject-predicate relation of judgment. He then proceeds to differentiate the forms of judgment by thinking through how the minimal form of judgment transforms itself into a further form, which entails more successive transformations. These metamorphoses continue until a form is reached that brings closure to the complete series of particular forms of judgment by engendering syllogism, where the unity of terms is mediated by another concept component, rather than being joined through the is of the copula. Hegel seeks to escape arbitrariness and incompleteness by presenting the differentiation of judgment as a self-development that ends up transcending judgment's immediate connection of subject and predicate. All intervention by an external theorist is thereby purportedly avoided. Whether Hegel has succeeded depends, of course, on whether the series he presents does comprise successive self-transformations that lead beyond judgment.

To test Hegel's achievement and, more importantly, explore the forms of universality in their exhaustive diversity, one must examine each form in succession, employing Hegel's account as a guide, wherever possible.

I Preliminary Overview of the Forms of Judgment and the Types of Universality

Complicating the evaluation of Hegel's treatment are the two somewhat incongruous ways in which he divides the territory. On the one hand, he claims that the itinerary of the forms of judgment reflectsPage 128 successive applications of categories of being, essence, and the concept to the connection of universal and individual. On the other hand, he offers a fourfold division of judgments into those of quality, reflection, necessity, and the concept. These two listings do map onto one another insofar as judgments of quality involve categories of being, judgments of reflection and necessity both apply categories of essence, and judgments of the concept apply categories from the logic of the concept. Nevertheless, some explanation is required not only for why being, essence, and the concept reappear, but for why the intermediate phase breaks into two successive sets of judgment.

Admittedly, the resulting taxonomy is not far removed from other traditional divisions of judgment. Under judgments of quality, Hegel offers the positive, negative, and infinite judgments, each pertaining to determinate being and involving inherence. Under judgments of reflection, the so-called quantitative judgments, Hegel presents the singular, particular, and universal judgments, each involving subsumption, rather than inherence. Under judgments of necessity, Hegel develops the categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive judgments, each containing relations of genus and species. Finally, under judgments of the concept, Hegel gives the assertoric, problematic, and apodeictic judgments, each presenting modal relations in which evaluations enter. Kant gives very much the same assortment, albeit in a different order, in his Table of Judgments: first, under quantity, the universal, particular, and singular judgments; second, under quality, the affirmative, negative, and infinite judgments; and, third, under relation, the categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive judgments; and fourth, under modality, the problematic, assertoric, and apodeictic judgments.² This convergence may well testify to mutual confusion as much as mutual enlightenment.

More indicative of the conceptual comprehensiveness of the proposed division is the typology of universals that it contains. The judgments of quality, reflection, necessity, and the concept contain, respectively, the abstract universal, the universal of class membership, the genus, and the universal of normativity, the concrete universal. Each of these types of universal entails a correlative type of individual and particular.

The abstract universal is abstract in that its quality inheres in individuals whose other determinations are entirely indifferent to the uni-Page 129versal they share. The individual that possesses the abstract universal is immediate in the sense that nothing else about it is mediated by its universality. For this reason, knowledge of the abstract universal inhering in an immediate individual indicates nothing more about the latter. All other knowledge of the individual must be obtained from...