Fear and Loathing 
In
 The Old Common Room  

‘Well, what do you think?’  Sudhir, palms spread, addressing the room.  ‘Shall we go in to lunch?  Or wait a little longer?’
‘He’ll be here, Sudhir.’   Helen, confident.  ‘He was in college  this morning, and he said he was coming.’
‘Well, of course, I accept both of those…..’  Sudhir, trailing off with a twinkle.
‘That’s unfair, Sudhir.’   Helen doesn’t want to play.  ‘He will be here.’
‘Definitely?’
‘Definitely.’
‘He may get locked in again.’  This from James.  ‘That was the excuse last time.’
‘Even then, James.’  Suitably grave, hiding the grin.  ‘He’ll find a way.’
‘And if he gets gunned down on the way?’   James is exasperated.  ‘Anything’s possible.’
‘That’s silly, James.  It won’t happen.’
‘Doesn’t matter.  Same logic.’  James is getting petulant.
‘I agree with Helen.’  Kinch  cools it down.  ‘He’ll be here this time.   He’d be too embarrassed not to.’
‘Indeed he will be here.’  Bob has spotted something.  ‘I can see him in the lodge.’

Enter David, adrip with briefcases.

-oOo-

Some of these sentences express propositions, and some express judgements.    Given their interpretations in this conversation, I take

	[1]	He said he was coming
	[2]	That’s unfair
	[3]	I agree with Helen

as here encoding propositions.   And under the same proviso, I take

	[4]	He will be here
	[5]	He would be too embarrassed not to be here
and	[6]	He may get locked in

as here encoding judgements.   It will be most useful, when things get complicated, to have acquired an intuitive grasp of which is which.  I present four differentia, crucially interlinked.

[A]	Judgements are not meant to hold come what may.  Propositions are.

Helen judges that David will be here.  And she is definite in her judgement.   Sudhir is hinting at a weaker verdict, perhaps that David might come.  Helen remains steadfast.   She reaffirms [4].  But she does not affirm

	[4a]	He will be here even if he is gunned down beforehand

Should we then convict her of logical error?  After all, if [4] encodes a proposition, a claim to fact about the future, it entails [4a].   And it is a basic dialectic principle that entailments of commitments are also commitments.   Is she guilty as charged?

Of course not.  Helen is entirely right.  [4] encodes her verdict, and verdicts are not meant to hold come what may.  They are meant to hold in the normal course of events.  As English speakers we have a sharp sense of the boundary here.  We know that some considerations can be dismissed out of hand (too unlikely to possibly alter a verdict).  And we know that others merit consideration.  Under further pressure from James (‘He still doesn’t know the security code’) Helen might even amend her verdict to

	[4b]	(Okay, then) If he doesn’t get locked in, he’ll be here

but that shift would not commit her equally to stepping back to 

	[4c]	He’ll be here if he doesn’t get gunned down

The answer to that sort of quibble is not to pull in your horns and incorporate it into your judgement.  The answer is, as we all know,

	[7]	Fuck off.

From all of which it follows that the message encoded in [4] does not entail

[8]	He will not be gunned down beforehand

Quite so.  It is a judgement.   And judgements do not have truth-values.   The charge against Helen is dismissed.

The point holds quite generally, for all judgements.   When you essay a judgement on the future, there is always, given the contingency events, some unforeseen catastrophe, which you are in no position to rule out, whose occurrence would wreck your prediction.  Such is the nature of prediction.  So judgements are allowed considerable leeway in their logic.  And that means they cannot have truth-values.

Propositions, on the other hand, behave quite differently.  They are claims of fact, and so are meant to hold come what may.   Or rather, the notion of ‘what may’ does not apply to them.  Notice first, that 

	[9]	He was here this morning

certainly does entail

	[10]	He was not gunned down beforehand.

And second, that James’ quasi-logical pressure has no intelligible parallel.  Helen may concede that David could have got gunned down beforehand, and that if he had been, then he wouldn’t have been here this morning.  But she insists on [9], and deduces the truth of [10].    The flexibility allowed a judgement has no place here.   And this, of course, is because propositions are claims of Past and Present Fact.  For them, what may has already come.  

[B]	Propositions are autonomous, judgements personal

Propositions are true of the world whether anyone affirms them or not.  Judgements have to be someone’s.
There cannot be a judgement without a judge.   When we agree on a proposition, you and I, we each independently claim the same fact.  When  Sudhir accepts that David was here this morning, he does just that.  He accepts it, and takes it on board as fact.  But he can’t just accept the judgement that David will be here.  One way or another, he has to make it his own.  He might acquiesce in it, trusting Helen’s judgement in general, or her confidence in this particular case.   If so, he would be imagining, on his own behalf, the future turning out according to Helen’s prediction.  Or he could endorse her judgement, as Kinch and Bob did.   Anywhichway, he makes it his own.

[C]	These differentia are represented in consciousness. 

Here, of the nature of the case, I can only report my own experience, and ask you to try the same experiment.    

When I enter most intimately into myself, into awareness of my thinking, I find a sharp difference in the phenomenology of proposition and judgement.    Propositions I take out of store.  I pass them on.  They are anybody’s.   My verdicts are mine.  I am conscious of taking the decision that issues in a verdict, and I am conscious of  responsibility for that decision.   I am also aware of  launching my judgements  into a void with which I have no contact, and feel their fragility as I do so…...

I should stop now, for fear of putting ideas into your head.  But I suggest you try the experiment.  Practice awareness of  your thinking across my big divide, and see what you notice.

[D]	Propositions and judgements have a different Grammar

Let me remind you of my paradigms.  Given their interpretations in the Old Common Room, I take these sentences

	[1]	He said he was coming
	[2]	That’s unfair
	[3]	I agree with Helen

as encoding propositions.   And under the same proviso, I take these sentences

	[4]	He will be here
	[5]	He would be too embarrassed
and	[6]	He may get locked in

as encoding judgements.   

All encode simple messages,  of subject-predicate form.  Each message concerns the satisfaction, by a notional subject, of some predication condition.  So each has a Time, the time of that predicate’s satisfaction.  And each has a Tense, present or past, corresponding to the selection of the inflected form of the verb in the issuing sentence.  The grammatical difference is clued by the shape of the verb-phrase,  but it resides in the encoded relationship between Time and Tense:- 

 [1], [2] and [3] have verbs of the primary  pattern

		VP 	Vf

Where the  Vf is a finite, inflectional form, present or past tense.  

[4], [5], [6] have verbs of the secondary pattern

		VP 	Mod  Vb

Where Mod is a finite, inflectional form, present or past tense, of a modal secondary auxiliary.  And Vb  is the base of the verb , – what Latin grammarians call the infinitive.
So primary pattern versus secondary pattern is a visible clue to the encoding programs involved.  What distinguishes the two encoding programs is the different choices they force on Time and Tense.  And here is the crux of the matter:

THE CRUX: 		For propositions, Time and Tense are the same.	
For judgements, they are different.  

As inspection of my paradigms will deliver.

[1] encodes a message about a time in the past, in a past-tense sentence.  [2] and [3] encode messages about the present in present-tense sentences.

Whereas [4] and [6] encode messages about the future in present-tense sentences, and [5] encodes a message about the future in a past-tense sentence.

-oOo-

Tune in next week for another episode of:

Fear and Loathing