What, how, and why do you judge?
I was thinking about something while riding the subway the other day. It was about judging, or perhaps a better word is “assessing.” The question today is: is it possible to judge a situation or “event” without prior knowledge and experience and have the result be useful, meaningful, relevant, and non-trivial.
As usual I’m going to use an analogy here. Picture yourself in deep space (the sci-fi lover in me comes out) and your floating there minding your own business when a circle appears in front of you. To bring this back to my original point, can you judge/assess the distance of the circle from your point in space? An example, in this case, of what I mean by “useful, meaningful, relevant, and non-trivial.” Since we’re interested in just the distance, an assessment telling us that it is a circle, or that it is blue is useless/meaningless/irrelevant/trivial to the needs and requirements of the judgment of distance.
It would seem to me that the answer to that question is no and the reason why is what really got me thinking. The reason why is because you have no information about the given situation. You do not have the size of the circle therefore some simple Pythagorean math is out, you do not have any form of comparison such as a car or planet with which to compare the circle etc. The point is that you could judge the distance to the circle if you had some prior knowledge, such as its size or something of known size with which to compare it. All of the cases though require some givens without which you cannot EVER find the distance to the circle (as far as I know).
So then, can we as humans judge any situation well or fairly if we have no connection or prior knowledge of it? Can the one who’s never felt love advise his brother on such a thing? Can a philosopher tell an engineer how to do his job? And would a childless, unmarried CEO really know what’s better for “labourers and their families?”
Part of what we do of course is try and find commonalities and similarities between situations, thereby giving us something on which to place our foundations for judgment. We’re all human and we crave security and food and warmth. But how far does that go, and how far can it go before we have to recognize that we’re out of our depth? It would seem that experience is the key to being a good judge. I suppose that’s the central idea of the concept of wisdom. A wise person is not one who necessarily knows everything but one who has experienced much and can offer valuable insights.
Rules and regulations attempt to be some sort of judge but they always seem to fall woefully short. Mind you, this could all be wrong, there may be a simple way to judge without the need for prior information and if you know what it is, I would love to hear it.