The stolen “Stolen Concept Fallacy” fallacy.

The Fallacy of the Stolen Concept was coined by Ayn Rand, to point out the absurdity of arguing against a position when the argument depends upon that position – setting up a kind of indirect (and hence not so obviously paradoxical) version of Epiminedes-style “this sentence is false”. For example, to argue that all consciousness is really dreaming requires that there be some state one could recognise as ‘waking’, in order that dreaming could be distinct from it. One steals the concept of ‘waking’ (on whose existence ‘dreaming’ depends) in an attempt to argue there is no such thing.

It’s rather a misnomer, as it conjures up an implication that there is some principle of concept ‘ownership’. And self-referentially, a common illustration of the fallacy is ‘property is theft’ – the supposed fallacy being that, as theft has no meaning without a concept of ownership, the statement is a paradox. (That slogan was never intended as a formal philosophical argument, of course, and a much less pretentious retort to such a definitional declaration could legitimately be “no it isn’t”).

We are, of course, familiar with the “stolen concept”; it is a regular slogan of William J Murray. However, I submit that his usage is frequently incorrect. Despite correcting others who fall into the ‘ownership’ trap, his usage all too frequently invites, or makes, that tumble. For WJM, “I”, “moral”, “true”, “right”, when used by the “atheo-materialist”, are stolen concepts. However, there is nothing fallacious about simple usage. Unless one is trying to deny the existence of one of these concepts using something which depends upon it – eg “I do not exist”, or “There are no true statements” – then there is nothing fallacious going on. Murray’s misuse relates to an apparent understanding of the stolen concept as a declaration that such concepts cannot be derived from materialism. Which is not, I think, what Rand was saying – and, further, is incorrect. One does not need a supernatural entity before one can talk of what one ‘ought’ to do, or whether Truth etc exist. And the presence of such a supernatural entity offers no guarantees that they ground morality, or that they render anything True other than truth-propositions on the existence of supernatural entities.

If an atheist were to argue that (for example) it was immoral to care about one’s actions, they would be committing the fallacy of the stolen concept. But to simply talk of ‘morality’ (merely: what one ‘ought’ to do), or ‘moral duty’, ‘moral fibre’, ‘amorality’, ‘immorality’ – no attempt is being made to disprove the concept by its usage outside of religion. Even if it is definitionally the case that morality refers only to those oughts and ought-nots adjudicated by a spiritual arbiter, usage in another context (such as by someone who does not believe in said arbiter) is still not a stolen concept, sensu Rand.

An atheist can mean something by ‘moral’, and be in broad agreement with a theist about what it means, simply disagreeing about the source – human sensibility or divine decree. Ironically, Rand’s own moral writing was grounded in the kind of thinking that Murray would dismiss as materialistic ‘concept-stealing’. That which is moral, for Rand, is that which a human should value in relation to his own survival. We only have values because we can be destroyed, and we’d like to avoid that, ta very much. Theists extend that – as they have a sense in which we can be spiritually destroyed as well, after death, they care about morality because they care about preventing that spiritual destruction. But to dress up the implicit egoism that remains, they invoke an entity that cares as much about objective ‘values’ as they do about what they fundamentally value – their permanent identity.

FWIW, I disagree with Rand on morals. I think we possess an altruistic sense, that I am happy to term ‘moral’, which derives from our sociality as a species, and is sustained by both genetics and culture. It is not a matter of pure egoism, but the balance of the ‘requirements of the self’ and other constraints that arise from our desire to fit in with society. It is manifest by the sense of warmth we experience on witnessing or doing ‘good’, and an abhorrence for ‘bad’. Our morality articulates these shared sensations (shared by most, that is); religion packages them with additional carrots, sticks and reification. Society has proved a great survival feature of our species. We experience positive sensations on helping others, negative on hurting, because our ancestors who possessed these characteristics were more successful at procreating (thanks to sociality) than those who went it alone. As a sense, it is developed to a varying degree by society’s present members. Some possess it not at all, others to a very high degree, just as with a sense of humour, or beauty.

It is of course in the nature of things that religious and cultural norms can directly mould this individual sense – outrage against homosexuality, promiscuity, contraception or cussing, for example, appears viscerally felt, whereas those with (ironically) more personal freedom in such matters tend to be less prone to shock-horror at such things, while being at least as opposed to murder, torture and dishonesty.

135 thoughts on “The stolen “Stolen Concept Fallacy” fallacy.

  1. This was my argument to WJM awhile back that appeared totally lost on him. That his projects of how other people derive their concepts might be totally inaccurate is apparently something he can’t even consider.

  2. Neil Rickert: And that makes no sense to me.

    Problem 1: concepts are never derivable from premises.
    Problem 2: I don’t start with a set of ideological premises.

    Bogus atheistic logic, From what derive you concepts? With what did you start?

  3. That his projects of how other people derive their concepts might be totally inaccurate is apparently something he can’t even consider.

    I can’t consider arguments or explanations that others do not provide..

  4. Bogus atheistic logic, From what derive you concepts? With what did you start?

    “I’m hungry”

  5. Problem 1: concepts are never derivable from premises.
    Problem 2: I don’t start with a set of ideological premises.

    I can’t argue with those who owe no obligation to logic.

  6. Under your own terms, the use of ‘stolen concept’ in that context is simply nonsensical …

    I can’t help that it doesn’t make sense to you after I explained it in that post. It’s not my job to explain something ad infinitum to those that are willfully denying the obvious.

  7. William J. Murray: I can’t consider arguments or explanations that others do not provide..

    But how can they when by definition, those arguments or explanations are invalid from the start according to you?

    I ask again, provide a set of options available to the atheist that you will not consider “stolen”.

  8. He has published. Whether he still stands by anything he has published is uncertain.

    I was asked for some evidence that anyone has read and approved of anything he has published and still stands by.

    The “It’s obvious” bomb is an notable conversation stopper. Is anything WJM says obvious to the denizens of UD? I never saw the bandwagon.

  9. Bogus atheistic logic

    I would have said the same back when I was a theist.

    Logic is a procedure whereby one derives some propositions (conclusions) from other propositions (premises). There isn’t any deriving of concepts.

    From what derive you concepts?

    Concepts are sui generis. They are not derived. They are constructed. They are prerequisite to having premises.

    With what did you start?

    With whatever I had at birth, plus experience (including social experience).

  10. Allan Miller: That people here deny theism is undenied, but to assert that morality is ‘logically and genetically dependent on it’ is unjustified. One is simply giving a different account of the phenomenon of morality. I’ve sketched out a version of materialism that sees morality as an outgrowth of sociality: a complex set of behaviours and restraints that involve input from both the genetic and the cultural. There is nothing irrational about this, and it is derivable from materialism.

    First, a minor point: a cultural-biological explanation of morality is consistent with “naturalism” (broadly construed), but I’m not sure it’s consistent with “materialism” in the narrow sense of it’s-all-atoms-and-void. And “consistent with” is not the same as “derivable from”.

    Second, and more substantively, such an explanation of morality is not going to satisfy Murray — he will regard this a change of topic, not a different account of the same topic. This is because of two different commitments that he has up-and-running: (a) the assumption that if moral judgments and deliberation are not objectively valid, then they collapse into the mere expression of subjective preferences — and even aggregated preferences are still subjective, at the end of the day, so that “we agree that murder is wrong” is basically like “we all like ice-cream”; (b) the assumption that “objective” means the same thing as, or implies, “absolute”, “fundamental,” “unchanging,” etc.

    Given both (a) and (b), only theism provides us with absolute/objective morality — or so Murray claims.

    But in fact, each step of this line of reasoning is highly questionable.

    First: avowals of intention (I shall do X) are different from expressions of desire (I desire Y), because of the emphasis on *action* rather than on experiencing a particular psychological state.

    What makes morality unique lies in the unrestricted scope of the avowal — to say that X is moral (where X is an action) is to say that anyone who is relevant circumstances should, all things being equal, do X, regardless of whatever desires or beliefs she has. And the “anyone” here is ‘open’ — it doesn’t pertain to Americans, or Christians, or liberals — it’s anyone (who is in relevantly similar circumstances). So, to say, “torture is wrong” is to say, such things as: it should not be the case that there is torture, no one should engage in torture, those who torture should not be regarded as members in good standing of the moral community, and so on.

    (It is, of course, worth pointing out that the question, “who gets to decide the boundary of the moral community” is, in some sense, the fundamental question of politics.)

    So now Murray’s challenge is that morality in the sense of “what anyone should do” is not consistent with the belief that God does not exist. But why not?

    Presumably there is something like this in mind: the universality and objectivity of moral language implies that it cannot depend on any aggregate of human preferences, desires, etc. It must be ‘grounded’ in some aspect of reality that would be as it is regardless of whatever desires or preferences anyone happened to have.

    But the configurations of atoms cannot ground any ought-claims with the requisite universality and objectivity. Only the goodness of God can do that. The goodness of God does so by making it such that human beings have a set of purposes, such that the morally right actions are those that align with or promote our purposes, and the morally wrong actions are those that do not. If “configurations of atoms” is all there is, then there aren’t any purposes built into the fabric of reality, and so there’s nothing to ground the objectivity and universality of moral judgments.

    The deep problem with this view, in my assessment, is that it rests on a slide from “objective” to “absolute.” If it’s the case that our purposes must be built into the very fabric of reality in order for there to be objective morality, then certain things would indeed follow — but we must be careful to distinguish between the true (or false) claims we’re asserting and are answerable to, and the states of affairs that make those claims true (or false). The truth-value of the claims can be revised when new facts about the world are discovered. So we can be fallibilists about our claims without giving up on objectivity.

    Now, pretty much everyone will agree that scientific theories aren’t absolute, and that they are objective. So here we have a clear case where absoluteness and objectivity do not go hand-in-hand. (Arguably, one might say that the facts about the physical world which make those theories objectively valid are absolute — e.g. the laws of physics — though an ontological emergentist would deny even that.) Accordingly, I don’t see any in-principle objection to the thought that the objectivity of moral judgments and actions is revised as we discover more about what promotes and hinders the cultivation of human capacities.

  11. Robin

    [Blas] Bogus atheistic logic, From what derive you concepts? With what did you start?

    : “I’m hungry”

    This is why I tune into TSZ. Well done, Robin!

  12. William J. Murray: I can’t help that it doesn’t make sense to you after I explained it in that post. It’s not my job to explain something ad infinitum to those that are willfully denying the obvious.

    Ah, classic WJM. The problem is the reader; my usage is impeccable, and you are [yawn] ‘wilfully denying the obvious’. Here is the post in question, in full, my bold on the usage I found nonsensical, and with subsequent ruminations that do not (to me) appear to address the matter at all, but something I did not say:

    Me: People putting oddities in their own grab-bag of ‘Things I Call Moral’ is no more an issue than that they should choose ‘banana’ as their term for a striped predator.

    WJM: Your example (of defining “banana” as striped predator”) and your use of terms “oddities” and “grab bag” indicates a stolen concept.

    “Striped Predator” is an objectively existent commodity. The idea that one would redefine that in a way that would mean the same thing as “banana” cannot be called an “oddity” under the atheistic premise, because subjective definition would be the rule, not an “oddity”.

    Under subjective morality, you calling a thing immoral, or defining a principle as moral, is the exact equal to anyone else calling anything else immoral, or defining anything else as a moral principle. There is no logical room for you to characterize it in the way you have above, implying that there is an objective standard of moral views and definitions by which certain views would be considered “odd” or like calling a banana a “striped predator”.

    This is what I mean when I say that in every post a self-described atheist/materialist/naturalist makes, their use of terms necessarily implies concepts that cannot be derived from their ideological premises. You just did it above – and I only pointed out the obvious case of stolen concept. The structure of your post indicates other stolen concepts in use, such as truth, self, etc.

    Perhaps others can see the obvious that I am wilfully denying. Even minority definition of words (quoth William) is a stolen concept: one cannot call it an ‘oddity’ under atheism. “Considered odd by other users of the language” is a stolen concept? Really? And we sign off with: “The structure of your post indicates other stolen concepts in use, such as truth, self, etc … “. I have searched in vain for those terms in my prior posts – and what is under that rock labelled ‘etc’? And yet you maintain your usage is not indiscriminate?

  13. First, a minor point: a cultural-biological explanation of morality is consistent with “naturalism” (broadly construed), but I’m not sure it’s consistent with “materialism” in the narrow sense of it’s-all-atoms-and-void. And “consistent with” is not the same as “derivable from”.

    I’m not sure I fully grasp this, but I am a little slack with my ‘isms’. I tend to use the terms as loosely as they are bandied about at UD: the generalised “not-a-theist”, and slip unnoticed from one to the other (even the dread ‘Darwinist’, though it fits poorly) as one might change one’s hat.

    But yes, I can see how a contingent explanation of the phenomenon of morality is not ‘deriving it’; it is only ‘logically’ derivable from a viewpoint that demands that the thing that makes it flow logically actually exist and does what it needs to do!

  14. William J. Murray: what we have here are a bunch of atheists that don’t really even understand the concept of making sure one’s beliefs and argued concepts are derivable from their ideological premises. That’s probably due to their disdain for philosophy – they aren’t really interested in checking their premises, inferences and conclusions for logical consistency because, frankly, they already know they’re right, so there’s no real reason for any such introspective analysis. Or, in the case of KN, one can always abandon (or, in his terms, “redefine”) reason itself so he isn’t subjected to such trivial matters like reconciling his views with his premises.

    Well, a few things here . . .

    First, I think it’s a terrible mistake to assimilate the rationality of a worldview to the model of rationality found in logic and mathematics — in domains where it is perfectly appropriate (indeed, necessary) to identify a set of premises and then derive everything one can from those premises. It’s an extremely powerful model of reasoning, but its power lies in its abstraction from content — it’s a decontextualized, highly rationalistic and intellectualistic way of proceeding.

    Second, and in light of the above, I don’t think of myself as starting off with “atheism” as a “premise” and proceeding from there. I don’t even regard myself as an “atheist,” since I feel that that term has been contaminated by the anti-theism of “the New Atheists.” I tend to think of myself as a non-theist or as an apatheist (even an agnostic apatheist — “does God exist? I don’t know and I don’t care”). What’s important to me is developing an intellectually adequate and emotionally satisfying worldview that has nothing to say about the existence or non-existence of God, one way or the other.

    The key way to do that, as I see it, is to reconcile what Sellars called “the manifest image” and “the scientific image”, in “Philosophy and the Scientiific Image of Man” (PDF). I like to call this “the problem of the Four Ms and the Four Fs” — on the one hand, the descriptive metaphysics of everyday human existence must account for mind, meaning, morality, and modality — on the other hand, the scientific description of the world explains our actions in terms of feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproduction. (“The Four Fs” comes from Pat Churchland; the “Four Ms” comes from Huw Price.)

    So I’m interested in arriving at reflective equilibrium between the Four Ms and the Four Fs, rather than in deriving anything from a set of para-logical premises. And that means that I’m already working out in an anti-foundationalistic, rather than foundationalistic, model of rationality. One can and should be critical of anti-foundationalism, of course, but it would help to understand what it is that one is criticizing.

  15. Allan Miller,

    That’s right.

    I do want to be more precise with the “isms” I bandy about, because I think the incautious use of the ‘isms’ is a sign of sloppy thinking and also why many discussions here and at UD go about in circles. But there’s little hope of even agreeing on any one set of the terms — even though my use of the terms is, obviously, the most helpful. 🙂

  16. I think it’s a terrible mistake to assimilate the rationality of a worldview to the model of rationality found in logic and mathematics …

    Yeah, I can imagine the burden of having beliefs logically reconcilable with premises is quite high for those that wish to have their cake and eat it, too.

    One can and should be critical of anti-foundationalism, of course, but it would help to understand what it is that one is criticizing.

    Whose understanding? Surely you’re not saying that there are anti-foundational premises that are set in stone and dictate how one can understand, define and argue against anti-foundationalism? I’d say that’s hypocrisy, but then there’s no such thing in this kind of sophistry. Anything goes.

  17. I have searched in vain for those terms in my prior posts

    Once again, it’s stolen concept, not stolen term. You don’t have to use the term to imply the concept.

    – and what is under that rock labelled ‘etc’? And yet you maintain your usage is not indiscriminate?

    It’s not indiscriminate.

  18. First, I think it’s a terrible mistake to assimilate the rationality of a worldview to the model of rationality found in logic and mathematics — in domains where it is perfectly appropriate (indeed, necessary) to identify a set of premises and then derive everything one can from those premises.

    A “terrible mistake”? One wonders what that could possibly mean in KN’s ideological world. Does mistake here mean “error”, as if there was an objectively correct way of thinking about things? Is it “terrible” because there are necessary and dire consequences for thinking that way?

  19. William J. Murray: Yeah, I can imagine the burden of having beliefs logically reconcilable with premises is quite high for those that wish to have their cake and eat it, too.

    A laudable attempt at snark, but apart from that, it really misses the mark, because I actually gave an reason for why I think that the rational constraints on formal systems are inappropriate for worldviews: namely, the importance of content.

    So maybe I should elaborate: when we’re considering an inferential system (whether formal-inferential or material-inferential), we of course do want to make sure that we only endorse the conclusions that follow from our premises, and not endorse the ones that don’t. That’s all well and good. But a comprehensive, all-embracing philosophical system, if it is to serve as a guide to conduct and to make us better people, cannot be inferential ‘all the way down’ (or ‘up’), because we’re not purely rational beings — we’re rational animals, creatures of finitude, needs, and passions, and we want a philosophy that is informative about the role of reason in human life, rather than a philosophy that is so completely rational that it forgets to be human.

    Whose understanding? Surely you’re not saying that there are anti-foundational premises that are set in stone and dictate how one can understand, define and argue against anti-foundationalism? I’d say that’s hypocrisy, but then there’s no such thing in this kind of sophistry. Anything goes.

    Again, a lovely piece of snark that misses the mark. I took it for granted that the context of our conversation would make it clear that I was referring to one’s understanding of the history and theory of anti-foundationalism in epistemology and metaphysics. Not that I expect anyone here to be familiar with Hegel, Peirce, Neurath, Quine, Sellars, or Rorty — but I do expect everyone to be honest about what it is that you don’t understand.

  20. But a comprehensive, all-embracing philosophical system, if it is to serve as a guide to conduct and to make us better people, cannot be inferential ‘all the way down’ (or ‘up’), because we’re not purely rational beings — we’re rational animals, creatures of finitude, needs, and passions, and we want a philosophy that is informative about the role of reason in human life, rather than a philosophy that is so completely rational that it forgets to be human.

    Is that the queen’s we? You don’t speak for me. I’m sure that definition of “what we are” serves your philosophical desires, but is that “the” definition of what we are? Is that premise objectively true? Or just how you see humans in order to justify your particular needs? Am I supposed to agree with your conceptualization of what humans are, and need? Why should I?

  21. BTW, those aren’t snarks. That’s me pointing out your self-refuting sophistry.

  22. Or, it is snark, in reality, regardless of WJM’s bluster that it’s not.

    We might hypothesize that WJM’s I-believe-whatever-I-think-serves-me-best worldview has chronically damaged his brain’s ability to see reality and be honest about it even to himself, with his adopted worldview forcing his brain to see himself as a warrior against altheist illogic and “sophistry”. Poor dear.

    An alternate hypothesis well-supported by the evidence is that WJM has zero idea what any English word in common usage means and has learned/constructed an idiosyncratic dialect-of-one. He shows a simple but pervasive and unfixable failure to speak his (presumably) native language. Poor dear.

    At least Blas has a native language excuse.

  23. Can we have a list of ‘stolen concepts’, please? I appear to commit the stolen concept fallacy even when I don’t actually use a term – because even if I don’t use the term, I am using the ‘concept’. I’m not using the concept in order to deny theism, it has nothing to do with “ownership”, and my usage does not appear to be self-refuting in the ‘Wiki’ sense: “the act of using a concept while ignoring, contradicting or denying the validity of the concepts on which it logically and genetically depends.”, since it is not established that any of the terms so labelled is logically or genetically dependent upon concepts that may (for all we know) be only imagined. And I would say it needs to be separately established for each.

    We may assume that the Concept on which the concepts I ‘steal’ logically and genetically depend generally equates to God, though conceivably some other part of the extra-material has jurisdiction on these concepts.

    Now, so far, the ‘stolen concept’ card has been played in relation to my usage of such concepts as:

    “self”
    “truth”
    “objectivity”
    “morality”
    “obligation”
    “minority definitions”

    These are all therefore, to accord with the fallacy, concepts which logically and genetically depend on … not just theism, but a [God] with an interest in the application of these terms, with the ability to discern correct and incorrect usage, and some form of sanction on the topics that matter to it: a theism which would have to be like it needs to be in order to make them stolen concepts!

    Any others? And do I have any language left after this evisceration?

  24. Neil Rickert: I would have said the same back when I was a theist.

    Logic is a procedure whereby one derives some propositions (conclusions) from other propositions (premises).There isn’t any deriving of concepts.

    Concepts are sui generis.They are not derived.They are constructed.They are prerequisite to having premises.

    With whatever I had at birth, plus experience (including social experience).

    Off course concepts pooffed from nothing like the universe.
    How can we trust in logic based in premises, made of concepts that we constricted with “nthing?” ?

  25. How can we trust in logic based in premises, made of concepts that we constricted with “nthing?” ?

    We don’t.

    We trust our judgment, even though our judgment is sometimes wrong. When we see a logic argument, we judge whether it is correct. And if we judge that the conclusion is wrong, even though the logic seems correct, we will begin to question the premises. It is judgment, not logic, that is a core cognitive faculty.

    I’ll add an off-topic comment. My disagreement with AI (see the AI thread), boils down to the problem that AI implements logic but fails to implement judgment.

  26. Neil:

    I’ll add an off-topic comment. My disagreement with AI (see the AI thread), boils down to the problem that AI implements logic but fails to implement judgment,

    I responded in the “AI Skepticism” thread.

  27. William J. Murray: Is that the queen’s we?You don’t speak for me. I’m sure that definition of “what we are” serves your philosophical desires, but is that “the” definition of what we are? Is that premise objectively true? Or just how you see humans in order to justify your particular needs? Am I supposed to agree with your conceptualization of what humans are, and need? Why should I?

    I take it as a starting point that normal mature human beings are rational animals — that is, on the one hand, we have the distinctively animal capacities of sense-perception, awareness, and voluntary movement — but in the life of a normal mature human being, the relation between perception and action is mediated by implicit inferences which can be made explicit, contested, and defended. That is, we occupy places in the social space of giving and asking for reasons, and our capacity to be responsive to reasons makes our kind of perception and action importantly different from the perception and action of non-rational animals.

    I take this claim to be one of fundamental description, or to use a related term, a transcendental description — a description of the kind of being that a normal mature human being is, and that must be presupposed in order for there to be the sorts of activities that we characteristically engage in, such as the philosophical discussion that we’re having here.

    If you have an alternative conceptualization to put on the table, by all means do so. We can talk about that, too.

    Given that transcendental description, we can then pose the question as to how it came about that we are the kinds of beings that we are, and we can ask how our characteristically human epistemic functions are implemented or realized, and we can look to evolutionary biology and to neuroscience to answer those questions.

    The very heart of my view is what I call “transcendental naturalism”: that transcendentally-specified roles, arrived at through a highly general description of our epistemic activity, are correlated with empirically-specifiable role-players, arrived at through causal explanations of observable phenomena.

    I’m not the first philosopher to use the phrase “transcendental naturalism,” and I haven’t published my version of it yet — I’ve been refining it over the past few years, though, and it will be the focus of the book I’m now working on. If I’m successful in working out all of the relevant details, the division of labor between the transcendental and the natural will reconcile the Four Ms (mind, meaning, morality, and modality) on the transcendental side with the Four Fs (feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproduction) on the naturalistic side.

    The key is to show that neither the transcendental nor the natural are a threat to the other — we don’t need to go supernatural to explain the transcendental, and we don’t need to reject the transcendental to acknowledge the natural. In other words, there’s no either/or between supernaturalism and reductive/scientistic materialism. A lot of philosophers, especially recently, have been trying to show that there’s a via media between those options; my version builds on the earlier attempts by Sellars and by Merleau-Ponty. (I say that just so that my claims to originality are properly contextualized.)

  28. Neil Rickert: We don’t.

    We trust our judgment, even though our judgment is sometimes wrong.When we see a logic argument, we judge whether it is correct.And if we judge that the conclusion is wrong, even though the logic seems correct, we will begin to question the premises.It is judgment, not logic, that is a core cognitive faculty.

    I’ll add an off-topic comment.My disagreement with AI (see the AI thread), boils down to the problem that AI implements logic but fails to implement judgment.

    And what is judgement? With what tools judgement works? How do you get that tools

  29. And what is judgement?

    “Judgement” is the preferred spelling of “judgment”. But those American dictionaries, built into spell checkers, force me to use “judgment” anyway.

    Judgment is the making of sensible decisions.

    With what tools judgement works?

    Brains. As I see it, judgment is pragmatic decision making. Our ability to judge comes from our knowledge and our experience.

    How do you get that tools

    We were born with brains. With our experience of interacting in the world, we learn to use those brains effectively, and to make sensible decisions.

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