Study On The Judgmen Theory Of Moritz Schlick

Moritz Schlick is one of the founding father of Logical Empiricism, and his thoughts of epistemology are intensively included in his Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (General Theory of Knowledge). Schlick’s epistemology takes judgment as the research object from the aspect of Logistics, and judgment theory penetrates his whole epistemology. He believes that the essence of judgment is the sign which indicates fact, and judgment always indicates the relationship between objects. Thus, there is no monomial judgment. Besides, Schlick mainly discusses the effects of positive judgment and negative judgment, universal judgment and particular judgment, apodictic judgment and problematic judgment, as well as analytic judgment and synthetic judgment on constructing disciplinary knowledge. Through criticizing Kant’s synthetic a priori, Schlick demonstrates his own view of knowledge: cognition is perceiving one object through another, and concept and judgment are necessary tool for cognition. Definition is a kind of special judgment which has important effects in cognition. The result of cognition is expressed by judgment. Every true judgment expresses knowledge, if it isn’t a definition or a tautology. Judgment may not always be the knowledge; however, truth must be expressed through judgment. Truth can be divided into factual truth and conceptual truth. Interconnection between true judgment forms knowledge.Schlick’s idea concerning the inter-dependence and inter-regulation between concept and judgment describes precisely the real relationship between concept and judgment. Moreover, his thought regarding judgment and its truthfulness eliminates former scholars’ regularity of judgment and its truthfulness, adapting to Schlick’s requirements on knowledge, which reflects the principle of economy thought he highly praised. Scientific knowledge which Schlick insists on is expressed by the judgment that is an positive and universal, Modal judgments only express the psychological attitude which can not express knowledge, synthetic a priori judgment is impossible, and so on. All of the opinions profoundly revels the essence of scientific knowledge and the differences between logic and mentality. Certainly, there are some drawbacks in Schlick’s epistemology. For instance, although Schlick emphasizes science pursues the principle of economy thought, he doesn’t provide clear standard of division. Schlick’s nominalism leads to his tendency of solipsism.