Judgment

Judgments are a form of the lost performative and as such part of the metamodel within NLP and a distortion of reality when they are not accompanied with who is doing the judging.

Judging is our oldest belief, our most habitual holding-to-be-true or holding-to-be-untrue In judgement our oldest belief is to be found, in all judging there is a holding-to-be-true or holding-to-be-untrue, an asserting or denying, a certainty that something is thus and not otherwise, a belief in having really ‘come to know’ – what is believed true in all judgments? What are predicates? – We have regarded changes in ourselves not as such but as an ‘in-itself that is alien to us, that we only ‘perceive’: and we have posited them not as something that happens but as something that is, as a ‘quality’ – and invented for them a being in which they inhere, i.e., we have posited the effect as something that effects and what effects as something that is. But even in this formulation, the term ‘effect’ is still arbitrary: for of those changes that take place in us and of which we firmly believe we are not ourselves the causes, we only infer that they must be effects – according to the inference: ‘Every change has an author’. – But this inference itself is mythology: it divorces what effects from the effecting. If l say: ‘Lightning flashes’, I have posited the flashing once as activity and once as subject, and have thus added on to what happens a being that is not identical with what happens but that remains, is, and does not ‘become’. – To posit what happens as effecting, and effect as being: that is the twofold error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty. Thus, e.g., ‘The lightning flashes’ – ‘to flash’ is a state of ourselves; but we don’t take it to be an effect on us. Instead we say: ‘Something flashing’ as an ‘in-itself and then look for an author for it – the ‘lightning’.

Notebook 2, autumn 1885 – autumn 1886 paragraph 84