Ockham On Judgment, Concepts, And The Problem Of Intentionality

Introduction In this paper I examine William Ockham's theory of judgment — in particular, his account of the nature and ontological Status of its objects. ‘Judgment’ is the expression Ockham and other medieval thinkers use to refer to a certain subset of what philosophers nowadays call ‘propositional attitudes’. Judgments include all and only those mental states in which a subject not only entertains a given propositional content, but also takes some positive stance with respect to its truth. For Ockham, therefore, as for other medievals, a judgment is a type of mental State that includes attitudes such as belief, knowledge, opinion, doubt, faith, and so on.