ABSTRACT
In anticipation of Frege’s anti-psychologistic stance, Bolzano is not bewildered by the ambiguity of the term ‘judgment’ but strictly distinguishes judgments as mental acts from their propositional contents. The latter are called “judgments in themselves”, which is a descendant of Bolzano’s coinage “sentences in themselves”. While an act of judging is an individual event that is spatio-temporally located, causally efficacious, and dependent on the mind of a thinking being, a sentence in itself, as the primary bearer of a truth value, lacks a position in space and time, does not stand in causal relationships, and is independent of thinking beings or languages. Properties and relations such as ‘a priori’ vs ‘a posteriori’, ‘analytic’ vs ‘synthetic’, ‘deducible from’, and ‘grounded in’ are regarded as primarily applying to sentences in themselves. Despite the ontological differences between judgments and their contents, Bolzano assumes that there is a structural similarity insofar as the former consist of “subjective ideas” and the latter of corresponding “objective ideas”. Furthermore, Bolzano clearly separates judgments from acts of merely entertaining a thought. In contrast to Frege, however, he claims that they do not only differ by the relation the subject bears to the given content but also by the content itself. In mere thinking, the subject does not acknowledge the truth of a sentence in itself but just grasps an idea of the sentence. As to their formation, there are mediated judgments, i.e. judgments caused by other judgments, and unmediated judgments. Bolzano is unrealistically optimistic about both of them by holding that the latter are infallible and the former always inferred from premises that make them at least probable. A similar optimism is to be found in Bolzano’s treatment of degree of confidence as one of the intrinsic qualities of judgments, for the confidence the thinker subjectively places in her mediated judgments is taken to be determined by the degree to which it is objectively supported by the judgments it is inferred from. Further qualities of judgments addressed by Bolzano are clarity vs obscurity and distinctness vs confusedness. In his understanding, a judgment is distinct if the judger knows of which ideas and in which way it is composed. On the other hand, a judgment is clear based on the judger having an intuition of it, i.e. referring to it by a simple and singular idea.
