A Judgment on Judgment

A judgment is not only a judgment alone, but is also carries with it the measure upon which that judgment is made. The content can not be separated from its context. The cliché that the medium is the message is an affirmation of the importance of context over content. Stepping back and evaluating the context and well as the content creates another discourse on the media itself, another context within which that original content/context is placed and evaluated. Cultural studies is so much fun.

In physics you not only have measurements but you also have units for any meaningful physical value. (Then you also have margins of error, conservation laws, scalars or vectors, and so on). A judgment based on a poor or faulty understanding is likely to be a poor judgment. That has as much currency in the social world as it does in the sciences.

I think it is part of our psychology to judge whatever we perceive. Some people can after years of practice sometimes recognise the process as it happens. Perhaps the warning not to judge lest we be judged ourselves tells only half the story. The measure against which we base our judgments are what our judgments reveal. That context for judging can also be judged in turn. The context or measure reflects the quality of a judgment and is a more instructive indicator than the actual judgment that was made. Given a silly measure an actual judgment may be pure folly itself.

One obvious example would be to compare extra-judicial judgments in topics such as the so-called war on terror with proper due legal process where everyone is granted human rights and is given a fair trial. The quality of the judgments made reflect the contexts that those judgments were made in.

Rigorous testing of assumptions ensures that a given judgment made after careful consideration is likely to also be affirmed as correct by other people who may challenge that given judgment. Without due care a judgment may be arbitrary. Consistency is an important factor. It also has something to do with the notion of truth. Test truth and it will stand the pressure, not because it is tough but because it is closely contoured with reality. Obstinate folly can only shatter like a poorly assembled mixed metaphor, or whatever.

Any social group or culture that identifies itself claims that there is a common context for people who wish to associate as part of that social group. Some groups are more loosely defined than others. If there are disagreements there would normally be some commonly accepted way to work through the issues. Arguments between group factions can sometimes be all the more intense if there is no agreement even on that.

This is all a bit boring as a post with nothing much new being said. But there is one personal point that I would like to make. I have argued for our liberal democratic traditions publicly with little response. That was a public context. Yet I sense that public criticisms of myself are based around my personal life. And not one person has admitted it to me so the public charade remains. Everything I have written from a modern perspective based on the separation between the public and the private. Remember, judgments reflect the context, the society in this case. Who has personally talked with me about these ideas?

I don’t think that I am the one with things upside down. By analogy Version 2.0 could be compared to a shift in the earth’s magnetic poles such as when the earth’s magnetic south pole switches over to align with the geographical north pole and visa versa. Such switches in the earth’s magnetic poles have happened a few times over geological time. Some moral compasses seem to have been spinning around at random during the transition.

Share and Enjoy