ABSTRACT
The mental process involved in judgments has as yet not been definitely differentiated. Subjects have been made to judge again and again in psychophysical experiments, to be sure, without making the judgment process as such the object of retrospective observation; but even the secondary results of these experiments have contributed scarcely anything to our knowledge of the psychological nature of judgment. Marbe's judgment investigation devoted itself directly to the judgment as such, and applied systematic introspection to it for the first time. His investigation, however, frustrated itself because of its much too broad definition of the subject — each psychical process to which the predicate right or wrong was applicable passed as a judgment. This formulation, of necessity, led to Marbe's result that there is no experience specifically characteristic of the judgment. Moreover, Marbe's subjects at that time lacked the requisite training in introspection for these exceedingly difficult problems. An investigation by Messer yielded richer results. This established the judgment's experiential difference from any purely associatively-conditioned order of words, as well as from the attributive relation, and recognized the active character of the judgment. Since that time the act of judgment has been subjected to no more experimental investigations, so that we must get along with a phenomenological analysis until experimental results come from other quarters.
