That’s correct! Brentano on intuitive judgement

ABSTRACT

Philosophers have long tried to articulate the specific epistemic status of judgements that neither need nor admit of justification by drawing on the metaphor of ‘the light of truth’. In contrast, in Brentano's account of intuitive judgement correctness is central: intuitive or immediately evident judgements are ‘characterized as correct (right)’. The aim of my paper is to introduce and explore Brentano’s correctness-based view. I will conclude by relating it to the work of his students Meinong, Stumpf, and Husserl, who gradually eroded Brentano’s insights.

KEYWORDS:

• Brentano
• intuitive judgement
• correctness
• evidence

1. Intuitive judgement: the alethic versus normative conception

In this paper, I want to introduce and explore a normative conception of intuitive judgement that has to my knowledge been overlooked. I will start by outlining the alethic conception which so overshadows the normative one that philosophers have failed to take notice of.

The idea that there are judgements which neither need nor admit of justification yet can still be blamelessly made figures prominently in the history of philosophy. It can be found in Descartes and many other philosophers, but for my exposition, I will use Thomas Reid (1710–96) as a representative example. According to Reid, self-evident truths are

no sooner understood than they are believed. The judgment follows the apprehension of them [the axioms] necessarily, and both are equally the work of nature, and the result of our original powers. There is no searching for evidence, no weighing of arguments; the proposition is not deduced or inferred from another; it has the light of truth in itself, and has no occasion to borrow it from another.

(Intellectual Powers, 452)

So, we have self-evident truths on the one hand and intuitive judgements on the other. Grasping the self-evident truth that p, is finding oneself ‘under the necessity’ to judge that p. A self-evident proposition compels one to endorse its truth because the possibility of falsity does not even arise:

The light of truth so fills my mind in these cases, that I can neither conceive, nor desire anything more satisfying.

(Intellectual Powers, 233)

The product of this compulsion is an intuitive judgement.

There is much to discuss here,¹ but for the purposes of this paper it is only important to highlight that Reid proposed an alethic account of intuitive judgement: the account is framed in terms of truth. The light of truth fills the mind of the judging subject or, as the founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) later put it, the judging subject has an ‘immediate awareness [unmittelbares Innewerden] of truth’ (Prolegomena, 13). The contemporary literature continues to work out the basic thought of an alethic conception of intuitive judgements. For example, in his article “Seing the Truth”, Conee, 850) takes the ‘light of truth’ metaphor and runs with it; seeing the truth is supposed to be an experience that is a particularly good reason for believing a proposition. Bealer (“Intuition”, 207) argues that intuitions are ‘seemings of truth’.

It seems to me that alethic accounts of intuitive judgement are so dominant in philosophy that they seem without alternative.² And how could it be different? After all, truth is widely held to be the norm for judgement. So, discussions of whether an alethic conception is too narrow or incorrect etc. cannot get started.

Yet there is an alternative consideration which, I hope, will broaden our understanding of intuitive judgement. This alternative can be found in the work of the German philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917). Brentano’s main work, Psychology from an Empirical Point of View (1874), is the earliest example of an philosophy of (empirical) psychology. He exerted an important influence on what is now known as phenomenology, as well as the philosophy of mind and value theory. Brentano saw himself as developing an alternative to the truth-based conception of intuitive judgement. His basic notion was not truth, but correctness (Richtigkeit). In Brentano’s parlance ‘is (in)correct’ ((un)richtig) is not merely a stylistic alternative for ‘is true (false)’. The notion of correctness applies to actions in general and mental acts in particular. I can, for example, pronounce ‘Tobias’ correctly (rightly) or not, or correctly infer p from q and so forth. By applying these adverbs we evaluate, criticize, and commend acts and activities. In contrast, ‘true’ and ‘false’, ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’, do not go with propositions or sentences.³ Brentano’s conception is normative because the idea that someone who judges correctly judges as one should, figures prominently in it. It is an alternative to the alethic conception because the correctness of a judgement is distinct from its truth (see Sections 3 and 4).

My aim is to draw attention to Brentano’s normative view as an alternative to alethic views. In order to do so I will first clarify how Brentano saw the relation between truth and correctness (Sections 3 and 4) and then go on to explain what it means that a judgement is characterized as correct (Sections 5–8). In Section 9, I explain the relevance of evident judgement for Brentano’s view of truth. The final section (10) outlines how Brentano’s normative account was diluted by his students.

2. A first stab at evident judgement

Brentano suggested the normative view of intuitive judgement in his published talks and lectures. Here is a good example:

[All] men have by nature an impulse to trust certain other judgements that are equally blind – for example, those judgements that are based upon so-called external perception and those that are based upon memories of the recent past. What is acknowledged in this way may often be true, but it is just as likely to be false. For these judgements involve nothing that characterizes them as correct [durch nichts als richtig characterisiert].

But they may be contrasted with certain other judgements which are ‘perlucid’ or ‘evident’. The law of contradiction is one example. Other examples are provided by so-called inner perception, which tells me that I am now having such-and-such sound or colour sensations, or that I am now thinking or willing this or that.

(Right and Wrong, 12 [21]; I have changed the translation of ‘characterisiert als richtig’. References to the pagination of the German texts are in square brackets.)

Blind judgements can be correct, but they are not characterized as correct. This suggests that the contrasting evident judgements are so characterized. This is confirmed by a look at a letter from Brentano to Kraus:

I returned again to the question about correctness [Richtigkeit] and truth of a judgement in order to make clear what makes it so difficult for me to convince you. It seemed to me that the reason is that you think that the immediately self-evident judgement is only characterised as true, but not also as logically correct, while the opposite is the case. It bears the character of a judgement, as it ought to be. Therein lies implicitly that it is true, what minimally means that it is logically correct, in that it suffices [for truth] to match the logically correct judgement in quality, object, time aspect and modality.

(Letter to Kraus, 17 May 1916. In Brentano (Abkehr, 306); my translation and emphasis.)⁴

A (self)-evident judgement is not characterized as true, but as correct.

The formulation of Brentano’s view is straightforward: A judgement is evident if, and only if, it is characterized as correct. The task is to motivate and explain the basic notions Brentano relied on:

What is correctness, the feature evident judgements are characterised as having?

What is it for a judgement to be characterised as correct in contrast, for example, to simply being correct?

I will take these questions in order and devote the next two sections to the first question.

3. Correctness and truth

Brentano argued that the notion of a correct judgement is independent of and prior to the notion of a true judgement. The truth-conception that is relevant to Brentano’s discussion is a traditional view of truth that was often condensed into the slogan ‘Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus’. For the purposes of this section, the main point is that in this view truth requires a truth-bearer that stands in relation to something distinct from it.

Now, it is not obvious whether correctness is prior to truth. For example, Brentano’s student Husserl (Prolegomena, 176, Fn.) distinguished between correctness and truth, but explained correctness in terms of truth:

(H) S judges correctly that p if, and only if, it is true that p.

(H) requires that judging is a propositional attitude, that is, a mental act that can only be fully characterized by a proposition. What is a proposition? For the purposes of this paper, it is sufficient to say that a proposition is the meaning of a sentence for which the question, whether it is true or false, arises and can be assessed. (In (H) ‘p’ is a schematic letter that needs to be replaced by such a sentence.)

It is one of Brentano’s key-points that what he called judgement – ‘acknowledging’ (anerkennen) or ‘acknowledging judgement’ (anerkennendes Urteil) and ‘rejecting’ (verwerfen, leugnen) or ‘rejecting judgement’ (verwerfendes Urteil) – are not propositional attitudes. According to Brentano, acknowledging hearing F is thinking of hearing F in a particular mode: the positing or acknowledging mode. Acknowledging hearing F is not predicating the property of existence of it.

Acknowledgement seems also to be a factive notion. In German, the meaning of ‘Hans erkannte (un)richtig Protonen an’ is not that Hans (in)correctly acknowledged protons, but that he genuinely or properly acknowledged them. But there is a similar non-factive notion: belief-in (Glaube an). In English, such beliefs are ascribed by the intensional transitive construction ‘S believes in A’. ‘Believe in’ takes as complements singular terms (‘élan vital’), plural terms (‘gravitational waves’) and mass terms (‘dark matter’).⁵ Brentano (Psychology, 288 [II, 154]) himself uses this construction sometimes when he explains the distinction between judgement and presentation.⁶ In contrast to ‘S acknowledges A’, ‘S believes in A’ is not factive; one either rightly or wrongly believes in gravitational waves. Rightly or wrongly believing in gravitational waves is not the same mental state as rightly or wrongly believing that gravitational waves exist. For example, it seems artificial to say that my belief in gravitational waves is the belief that there are some things that are identical with gravitational waves.⁷

If the attitudes and states that are supposed to be the primary bearers of correctness are not propositional attitudes, their correctness cannot be defined via propositional truth. But the truth of the non-propositional attitudes that concern Brentano may be definable in terms of existence. Brentano himself (Ethics, 87 [139]) considered the following definitions:

(A) An acknowledging judgement is true if, and only if, the object acknowledged in it exists.

(R) A rejecting judgement is true if, and only if, the object rejected does not   exist.

On the face of it, (A) and (R) allow Brentano’s opponents to first define a notion of truth for acknowledging and rejecting judgements, and then use it to characterize correctness. Brentano’s reflections on truth often start from the slogan ‘Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus’. At least (A) captures something important in the ‘Veritas est adaequatio’ slogan: the true acknowledgement judgement conforms to the objects that there are.

Brentano had three reasons to reject correspondence definitions of truth, in particular those that were supposed to fit non-propositional attitudes.

First, the right-hand side of (A) and (R) employ the concept of existence. However, Brentano argued that the order of explanation is the other way round: the concept of existence is explained with respect to judgement:

[t]his concept [existence] undoubtedly is derived from experience, but from inner experience, and we acquire it with reference to judgement.

(Psychology, 210 [II, 52]).⁸

Well, not with respect to just any judgement but with respect to an acknowledging judgement. To get an idea of what Brentano has in mind here, consider an example. If I acknowledge protons, I am committed to have judged as one ought to with respect to protons. Conversely, I am committed to taking protons to be something that deserves to be acknowledged. For Brentano, the concept of existence is just the concept of ‘deserving to be acknowledged’. I will say more about this in the next section, but I hope the example already makes clear that for Brentano the concept and practice of acknowledging is prior to the concept of existence.

Second, (A) and (R) do not allow one to apply the concept of truth, for in order to do so, one needs first to recognize whether the object exists. But this is nothing but establishing that the judgement that x exists is true; and so on ad infinitum.⁹

Third, my rejection of phlogiston is true if, and only if, there is no such thing as phlogiston. Hence, either we introduce absences or negative facts, or truth cannot, in general, consist in a relation between a truth-bearer and an object.¹⁰

Brentano’s conclusion is that truth is not correspondence. No unpacking of the ‘Veritas est adaequatio’ slogan explains the concept of truth. This is one reason for Brentano’s genetic approach to fundamental concepts: We should not aim to define such concepts but give a story of how we acquired them. A representative example is the concept ‘good’:

In order to answer these questions [What is the nature of good?] in a satisfactory way we have first and foremost to find the origin of the concept of good which, like the origin of all our concepts, lies in certain concrete intuitive presentations.

(Right and Wrong, 8 [16]. In part my translation, my emphasis.)¹¹

Let us see, then, what the origin of the concept of truth is supposed to be.

4. Correctness before truth

How can correctness be distinct from and conceptually more basic than truth? Consider the following general point about concept acquisition:

Six-year-olds learn the concepts solid, liquid, and gas, say, by being presented with objects that they are asked to sort into kinds: does the chalk belong with the stone, the bottle of water, or the balloon? This kind of procedure relies not just on the child’s being mechanically disposed to sort objects in a particular way, but also on a primitive appreciation that what she is doing is appropriate; she recognises that the chalk should go with the stone, even if she cannot say anything about why it should. […] [T]he child is inclined to sort the chalk and the stone together, and implicitly takes her inclination to reflect how they ought to be sorted.

(Ginsborg, Normativity of Nature, 165)

We have a general sense that we do things correctly – we do things as they ought to be done – when we do them. We are committed to the correctness of what we do and would assent to it on reflection when the occasion arises. We may in fact do things incorrectly, but we still see ourselves as doing them correctly.

Brentano applied this to the activity of judging. When we make a judgement, we are committed to have judged as one ought to judge about the matter at hand. One holds oneself to a standard or norm which results in a concept of truth. In the following passage, Brentano outlined one way to move from correct judgement to one notion of truth:

Our presentations of truth and falsity, too, presuppose and are acquired by reflection upon judgements, as no one would doubt. If we say that every acknowledging judgement [anerkennende Urteil] is an act of taking something to be true, and every rejecting judgement [verwerfende Urteil] an act of taking something to be false, this does not mean that the former consists in predicating truth of what is taken to be true and the latter in predicating falsity of what is taken to be false. Our previous discussions have shown, rather, that what the expressions denote is a distinctive kind of mental reference to a content of consciousness. The only correct interpretation is that anyone who takes something to be true will not only acknowledge the object, but, when asked whether the object is to be acknowledged, will also acknowledged the object’s to-be-acknowledgedness [das Anzuerkennensein], i.e. its truth (which is all that is meant by this barbarous expression).

(Psychology, 239–40 [II, 89–90]; I have changed the translation.)

When we reflect on our acknowledging judgements, we need either to abandon them or take ourselves to have judged, as one ought, on the matter at hand. If we acknowledged the object A, we need to hold that our attitude with respect to A was the attitude one ought to have. And if acknowledgment was the attitude one ought to have to A, then A is something that it is correct to acknowledge: A merits acknowledgement.

Let us pause here to highlight the points that are important for our purposes. The judgement made is correct or incorrect, depending on whether the thinker judged as one ought to judge with respect to the subject matter in this situation. If we can conceive of one of our judgements in these normative terms, we are also in a position to form the concept of ‘to-be-acknowledgedness’ or ‘what is correctly acknowledged’. The corresponding property does not apply to judgements at all; it only applies to the objects of judgements. The concept of ‘to-be-acknowledgedness’ is supposed to be the property signified by the word ‘true’. Hence, our ordinary concept of truth does not apply to judgements, only their contents. But judgements have a normative property: correctness, the reflection on which leads to the introduction of a concept of truth.

As it stands, Brentano’s account of the origin of the concept of truth is incomplete. The question whether it is correct to acknowledge an object or not can arise only if one knows what correctness is. How, then, do we come by this notion prior to truth? In order to answer this question, we need to know more about evident judgement. Hence, I will complete Brentano’s account later in section 9.

According to Brentano’s genealogical account, judgements (understood as datable mental acts) are primarily correct or incorrect. Reflection on correctness enables one to recognize that the content (Inhalt), of what one judges has the property of ‘to-be-acknowledgedness’, that is truth.¹² But some will object that we not only ascribe correctness to judgements, but also truth. Take the following three sentences:

• (S1) Peter is a true friend.

• (S2) It is true that that Brentano was German.

• (S3) John’s judgement that Brentano was German is true.

In (S1) truth is ascribed to a person; in (S2) to a propositional content but not a dateable mental act, and in (S3) we seem to ascribe truth to a judgement. Is this observation the basis of an objection to Brentano?

By way of response, we need to first note that ‘true’ cannot have the same sense in (S3), (S2) and (S1). When we say that John’s judgement that Brentano was German is true, we do not predicate ‘to-be-acknowledgedness’ of it. How, then, is (S3) to be understood?

One nineteenth-century response to the above observation about (S3) was that expressions like ‘John’s judgement’ are referentially flexible as sometimes they do not refer to a judgement but to something that is related to a judgement. Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) noted, before Brentano, that we hear ‘a judgement’ as referring to a product of the datable activity of judging:

When understanding the words ‘a judgement’, ‘a statement’ ‘an assertion’ we certainly think of nothing else than something that has been produced [hervorgebracht] by judging, stating and asserting.

(Wissenschaftslehre I, 81–82)

When we say ‘John’s last judgement was true’, we do not apply ‘is true’ to a datable act of judgement, but to something that is related to it: the product of the activity of judging.¹³ What products are needs further clarification.

Bolzano’s response takes the subject-expression of (S3) to change its sense and reference. In contrast, Brentano held the subject part fixed and argued that the predicate ‘true’ is polysemous.¹⁴ Sometimes ‘true’ means ‘to-be-acknowledged’ and sometimes it does not. For example, after working through a number of attempts to define truth, Brentano remarked:

“Judging truly” and “judging correctly [zutreffend]” is a mere tautology […].

(“Concept of Truth”, 16 [27])¹⁵

Saying that a judgement is true is only another way of saying that the judgement is correct. A remark from Brentano’s lectures on logic is even clearer:

[Correspondence] means nothing other than that the judgement is true which judges the judged object as it is to be judged. (In this sense truth is the goodness of judgement).

(EL 80, 13.197)

If an object A merits acknowledgement, A has a normative property: it is to-be-acknowledged. Conversely, if A merits acknowledgement, the acknowledging of A, a mental act, has also a normative property: it is the attitude one ought to have to A; it is the correct attitude. The word ‘true’ can be used to ascribe a normative property to what is judged (the content) as well as to the judging. On Brentano’s account, it is to be expected that ‘true’ is polysemous because the different normative properties are closely related. With this in mind we can say that in (S3) one refers to a judgement and uses ‘true’ to ascribe a normative property to it. The judgement is correct; it is the attitude one ought to have to its object. Hence, the use of ‘true’ in (S3) and the like does not require Brentano to revise the view that correctness is conceptually fundamental and prior to truth.

Brentano’s genealogical account encourages us to acquire the notion of truth by reflection on commitments we incur when making a judgement. But it does not limit truth to correct judgements. Rather, as G.E. Moore pointed out, it does the opposite:

[Brentano] says that, just as an object is good if it be rightly loved, so it is true if it be rightly believed. The definition of truth has the same rare merit as the definition of good, namely, that it is objective.

(“Review”, 117)

Just as a work of art may merit admiration even if it is never admired, an object may merit acknowledgement yet never be thought of at all.

Putting correctness before truth in the order of explanation does not make one an idealist. Whether an acknowledging judgement is correct or not depends on what there is and not the other way around. I believe correctly in protons only if there are protons. Nothing in Brentano’s remark about correctness suggests that correct judgements determine the range of objects; rather the opposite.¹⁶ Brentano’s point is that one cannot define what correctness is by saying that an acknowledging judgement is correct if, and only if, the object acknowledged exists. For, as we have seen, the concept of existence is supposed to be derived from the concept of a correct judgement. Brentano’s thesis is that the concept of correctness is primitive and can be arrived at by paying attention to a particular kind of judgement: the evident judgement.

5. How not to understand ‘characterised as correct’

Evident judgements are supposed to be characterized as correct.¹⁷ In the previous sections we gained a better understanding of what correctness is supposed to be; but when is a judgement ‘characterised’ as correct?

There is an exegetical problem here. When you say ‘Thomas Mann’s novels are characterized by the complexity of their style’, you distinguish Mann’s novels from others in terms of the property of being written in a complex style. If ‘to characterise’ means only ‘to distinguish by providing a property’, ‘characterised as correct’ can at best be a property that is necessary, but not sufficient, for evident judgement. Both blind and evident judgements are in this sense characterized as correct; they are distinguished from incorrect judgements by being correct. My conclusion is that ‘characterised as correct’ cannot mean ‘distinguished by correctness’ or ‘distinguished in terms of correctness’.

Chisholm (Intrinsic Value, 49) rightly took being characterized as correct to be the central notion of Brentano’s epistemology and he tried to shed further light on it.¹⁸ After rehearsing Brentano’s account of how one acquires the concept of correctness, Chisholm writes:

And once I have the concept [of correctness], then, whenever I make an evident judgement, I can know that it is evident.

(Intrinsic Value, 49)

We wanted to know more about being characterized as correct. Now, Chisholm uses the notion to be understood better – evident, e.g. characterized as correct – in a transparency principle. Prima facie, we learn an epistemic truth about evidence, but not what evidence is. On a charitable reading Chisholm may have the following in mind:

A’s judgement J is characterised as correct if, and only if, A can know J is   correct.

But this does not distinguish blind from evident judgements. Of course, I can know that my judgement that 78 + 12 = 90 is correct by relying on testimony, by counting, or by using my calculator. But the judgement is blind.

6. How to understand ‘characterised as correct’

Let us change tack and ask whether there is an alternative meaning of ‘charakterisiert als’ that makes sense of Brentano’s claim? Yes, the German ‘charakterisiert’ means, among other things, the same as ‘kennzeichnen’ (to mark/to distinguish). Consider an example. The government has ruled that if a cereal is high in sugar, customers ought to be alerted to this fact. Hence, one day a supermarket employee goes round and ‘kennzeichnet’ all cereals with high sugar content, that is, they mark the high sugar cereals so that they stand out and the customer can easily spot them. If the cereal is characterized as high in sugar, it is indeed high in sugar and it says so on the package; the cereal announces its sugariness. Consider further a nineteenth-century example from the Oxford English Dictionary that illustrates one meaning of ‘to characterise’:

He does not stand out distinctly from the reader’s eye … He ought in some way to be characterized, to be stamped by a word, or phrase.

(R.B. Anderson’s translation of G. Brandes Eminent Authors of the Nineteenth Century (1866))

To characterize x is to put a stamp (hallmark) on x to make x stand out distinctly.

I think that this meaning of ‘to characterise’ is the one Brentano has in mind. Evident judgements are not only correct, but ‘marked out’ as correct; correctness is their hallmark. An immediately evident judgement is correct and ‘marked out’ as correct.

This consideration points us in the right direction, but now we need to clarify what it is to be characterized or marked out as correct. The intuition Brentano aims to get a grip on is made vivid by D.W. Ross:

[W]hen I reflect on my own attitude towards particular acts, I seem to find that it is not by deduction but by direct insight that I see them to be right or wrong. I never seem to be in the position of not seeing directly the rightness of a particular act of kindness […].

(Foundations of Ethics, 171)

Sometimes we simply know what is called for in a situation. If you realize that your partner is drowning, you know what the right thing do is, without consulting general principles or bringing other reasons to bear. In this situation, the action of swimming to save your partner is characterized as correct. If you act this way, you act correctly.

The same point can also be made with respect to judgements. When you see a train passing by and you are attentive, you see directly that one of the right or correct things is to acknowledge seeing what is presented. That is what the situation calls for.

7. Self-announcing correctness

We now have the intuition in view which drives Brentano’s discussion of immediately evident judgements: an immediately evident judgement is characterized as correct. In its first approximation, it is not only correct, but one ‘sees’ the correctness of the judgement. As it stands, this has not moved things forward very much. But if we address the following two questions, we can make progress.

First, if we go by Ross’s description, there are two events to consider: (a) ‘seeing’ the rightness of an act and (b) the right act. If the act under consideration is a judgement, the judgement would not be immediately evident, for it would strike us as correct in virtue of our ‘seeing’ its correctness. Hence, no judgement would be ‘characterised in itself as correct’. It would be correct because (a) we ‘see’ that judging is the right thing to do and (b) we have done the right thing, namely, made the judgement.

Second, what about ‘seeing of the correctness of an act’ in Ross’s description? If this seeing is a form of judging, the question arises whether the judgement about the judgement’s correctness is itself immediately evident or not. If it is immediately evident, the judger needs to see the correctness of the second-order judgement. If it is a blind judgement, how can it make the correctness of a first judgement manifest?¹⁹ A vicious infinite regress threatens. If seeing the rightness is not a judgement, but a seeming of rightness, we face similar questions. Is such a seeming characterized as correct? If so, we face the aforementioned vicious regress. If not, how can seeing rightness bestow a positive epistemic property on the distinct judgement?

Readers of Brentano’s Psychology will have a déjà lu experience. In this book, Brentano worked out a metaphysics of consciousness that addresses, among other things, a similar threat of an infinite regress of conscious acts. Brentano’s view has been discussed in detail in the literature.²⁰ Hence, I will restrict myself here to mentioning only the points that are relevant to my discussion.

Assume that hearing a note, and the awareness of hearing a note, are distinct, and that every mental act is conscious. Given these assumptions, an infinite regress ensues. There is hearing a note, the awareness of hearing a note, the awareness of the awareness of hearing a note, and so on. The regress does not get going if one abandons the view that hearing a note and the awareness of hearing a note are distinct mental events. Brentano went on to specify how one should conceive of hearing F, and the awareness of hearing F, if this assumption is rejected. There is one act that is directed towards both F and itself. When we attend to its direction towards F, we can describe it as ‘hearing F’; when we attend to its relation to itself, we can describe it as ‘awareness of hearing F’:

Consciousness of seeing and consciousness of something coloured belong to the same act. It is one act that we divide only conceptually by, on the one hand, conceiving of it as having the coloured as object and, on the other hand, as having the coloured seeing as its object.

(Religion und Philosophie, 191; my translation)

Let us apply Brentano’s proposal for regress prevention to our problem. The problem arises because it is assumed without argument that seeing correctness of judging, and judging, are distinct mental events. If one abandons this assumption, there is no regress. There is only one judgement, but it is knowledge of what the right thing to judge is, as well as judging it. S’s judging is immediately evident if, and only if, S’s judging is identical with S’s knowledge of its correctness.

There is another way to think about the resulting view of immediately evident judgements. Brentano concluded from his reflections on consciousness that one mental act is directed on several objects, one of them being the act itself. Hearing a note is, for example, acknowledging the note, the primary object, as well as acknowledging itself, the secondary object.²¹ Now, we push this one step further. Consider the consciousness of hearing. This is supposed to be immediately evident. Consciousness of hearing is an acknowledgement of the note itself and its correctness. No regress of ‘seeings of correctness of an act’ ensues. We don’t even have to inquire what ‘seeing correctness of an act’ is.

Is this Brentano’s view? To my knowledge, Brentano did not discuss an epistemic regress argument in his published work. But in the posthumously published version of Brentano’s lectures on logic, the chapter on justification of judgements starts as follows:

There are judgements that announce themselves as correct [die sich als richtig kundgeben] that have the character of insight. One calls them self-evident.

(Richtigen Urteil, 141; my emphasis)

Now, we need to be careful in directly ascribing this view to Brentano. But it is perfectly in line with what Brentano should say according to the reconstruction proposed here, namely, that an immediately evident judgement is, among other things, an acknowledgement of its own correctness.

We can recruit the light metaphor to get an intuitive understanding of Brentano’s proposal.²² Reid wrote:

Perhaps evidence, as in many other respects it resembles light, so in this also—that, as light, which is the discoverer of all visible objects, discovers itself at the same time, so evidence, which is the voucher of all truth, vouches for itself at the same time.

(Intellectual Powers, 481)

If you shine a light into a dark room, you can see the things in it as well as the light itself. You do not need to shine a second light on the first light to see it. It makes itself visible. Reid considers the idea that immediate evidence is like light illuminating itself. Brentano not only considers but endorses this view of immediate evidence: an immediately evident judgement vouches for its own correctness.

8. More on evident judgement

Let us see whether our reconstruction of Brentano helps to understand evident judgements better.

First, if I judge with immediate evidence, I neither need, nor can have a reason, to support my judging:

Now, if one were to raise the same question [“Why do you really believe that?”] in connection with a judgement that is immediately evident, here, too, it would be impossible to refer to any grounds. But in this case the clarity of the judgement is such as to enable us to see that the question has no point; indeed, the question would be completely ridiculous.

(Right and Wrong, 12 [21])²³

Compare if you see what the correct thing to do is, you do not need an additional reason to do it. Brentano’s view that one mental act can acknowledge several things systematizes this intuition in a plausible way. The judgement acknowledges, among other things, its own correctness. An independent reason would only be required if it was an open question how to judge the matter. But the immediately evident judgement itself already closed this question by announcing itself as correct.

Brentano also speaks here to internalist intuitions. Imagine that God has given you the ‘natural light’. Whenever you grasp a mathematical axiom, you find yourself judging that things are as the axiom says. But you have no clue whether and why your judgement is right. In this situation, there is something wrong with you. You are like someone who makes blind guesses. Brentano’s view that immediately evident judgements announce their correctness, speaks to the intuition that this is an unhappy situation. If we can indeed see what is right to do, judge, and feel, this seeing must reveal its correctness to us without the need of further reasons. Brentano has an independently motivated way to satisfy this requirement.

Second, as we have seen, Brentano saw a close analogy between judgement, and love and hate. Just as there are judgements that are characterized as correct, there are instances of loving or liking that are also characterized as correct: Kriegel calls such emotions ‘self-imposing’ (Brentano’s Philosophical System, 225). An awareness of self-imposing love (or hate) is the source of our concepts of good (or bad):

When we ourselves experience such a love we notice not only that its object is loved and capable of being loved, and that its privation or contrary hated and capable of being hated, but also that the one is worthy of love and the other worthy of hate, and therefore that the one is good and the other bad.

(Right and Wrong, 14 [23]; my emphasis)

Brentano does not tell the analogous story about truth in detail; but it should be obvious by now how it would look.

9. Completing Brentano’s genealogy of truth

In Section 4, we have seen that Brentano owes his readers an answer to the question of how the concept of correctness is acquired prior to the concept of truth. We are now in a position to answer this question. Let us consider what Brentano said on this matter in a letter to Kraus.

An evident judgement is, as we already know, a judgement that is ‘characterised as correct’. Hence, making such a judgement is judging it to be correct. Brentano wrote to Kraus:

Whenever I perceive that I judge with evidence, I recognize myself to be someone who correctly judges. As often as I recognise that someone has formed a belief that corresponds to my evident judgement, although their belief may be unfounded, while another person has the opposed belief, the evidence of my judgement serves to recognise one of these judgements to be true in contrast to the other.

(Quoted in Kraus, Brentano, 32)

Let us expand on this. In order to clarify a concept one must compare objects that fall under it and compare them to ones that do not (Quoted in Kraus, Brentano, 32). Brentano makes evident judgements and he can compare and contrast them with blind judgements of the same content. In comparing his evident judgement that p with a non-evident judgement that p, he can home in on a joint feature of these judgements: they are both correct. One can only make such comparisons and extract the concept of correctness if one can be aware of evident and blind judgements that can both be forms of correct judgements. Hence, without making evident judgements I cannot arrive at the concept of correctness, and without the concept of correctness I cannot arrive at any of the concepts of truth discussed by Brentano. This consideration supports Brentano’s claim that one needs to have made evident judgements to know what truth is:

It [the concept of truth] can only be extracted [entnommen] from such instances of evident judgments. They must be pointed out to anyone who wishes to understand the word ‘true’ says [besagt].

(Ethics, 88 [141–2])²⁴

The last quote from Brentano’s letter to Kraus also sheds light on a controversial point in Brentano’s view of truth. In the letter, Brentano indirectly proposed a criterion of truth as a method to find out whether something is true. To simplify, let us consider only judgements whose correctness does not depend on the circumstances of judgement. If S’s judgement that p is evident, Brentano argues, anyone who judges like S, judges correctly, and what they judge is true. If S himself knows this, S has a criterion of truth: if the question is whether a judgeable content is true, check whether you have either made an evident judgement that acknowledges or rejects this content, or whether such a judgement can be inferred from evident judgements in evident steps.

This criterion may help to recognize the truth of the content of some judgements, but not every judgement’s content will be able to be acknowledged or rejected in an evident judgement. The Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932) gave the example of the propositional question of whether a diamond weighing 100 kilograms exists.²⁵ It might, in principle, be impossible to come to an evident judgement that acknowledges or rejects the diamond or to infer a judgement to this effect from evident judgements in evident steps. This example is not a problem for a criterion of truth that is supposed to provide a sufficient condition of truth. It is, however, a problem for a definition of truth. I think a charitable reading of Brentano, supported by the content of the letter quoted above, sees him therefore as endorsing a criterion of truth. He also proposed an account of how we acquire the concept of truth, but I am not convinced that he proposed an analytic definition of truth.²⁶ Consider Brentano’s methodological sermon that concludes his paper on truth:

What would be the use of trying to elucidate the concepts red or blue if I could not present one with something red or with something blue? All this has been disregarded by those who were concerned with the nominal definition of truth, whose history we have pursued. If, as I hope, we have succeeded in clarifying this clauded [getrübt] concept, we have done so only by focussing primarily on examples of true judgements. […] Even now, after the elimination of confusions and misunderstandings, our definition would convey nothing to one who lacked the necessary intuition.

(“Concept of Truth”, 17 [29]; I have changed the translation.)

According to Brentano, the ‘necessary intuition’ that ultimately grounds our understanding of truth is the awareness of the correctness of one of our judgements; that is, evident judgement.

10. Beyond Brentano

Brentano restricted the range of immediate evidence. Only inner perception – consciousness of present mental processes – and endorsements of logical axioms are immediately evident. According to him, immediate evidence requires the identity of the knower and the known. Less confusingly, the mental acts that are immediately evident, and its object, must be identical.²⁷ For example, current hearing, and my acknowledgment of my current hearing, are not distinct existences but the same mental event conceived under different concepts. Hence, if there is an immediately evident acknowledgement of hearing, there is hearing etc.

Brentano’s students started to expand the range of immediate evidence to judgements that seem not to possess this feature. Meinong argued that there are memory judgements that have conjectural evidence:

It seems to me that everyone can easily grasp what I mean by the term ‘conjectural evidence’ if he only pays close attention to how he treats memory. That one accepts the authority of memory because of a general proof [allgemeiner Beweisgrund], is something we are not aware of. The guarantee lies in the individual judgement, at least no unbiased person would look somewhere else. Nonetheless the memory judgement is not like a blindly picked up belief one clings to, it comes with an awareness of legitimation [Rechtbewusstsein] that the naïve mind rather overstretches than underrates.

(“Würdigung des Gedächtnisses”, 207. My translation and emphasis.)

Meinong’s view of immediate evidence is Brentanian in its core. An exercise of my faculty for episodic memory is my acknowledging, for example, seeing a cat in the past. My memory judgement is neither based on, nor justified by, a general principle about the reliability of my memory. How would I justify a belief in this general principle without relying on particular memory judgements? The memory judgement contains its reason within itself: it is characterized as correct. If I remember seeing something in the past, I am therein aware that my attitude is right. However, while characterized as correct, the memory judgement is not like an acknowledgement of present hearing. My memory judgement and its object are distinct existences: the seeing is in the past, the memory judgement is not. Since the memory judgement is distinct from its object, it is possible that it exists even though its object does not. The fallibility of memory judgements is Brentano’s reason to deny that they are immediately evident.

However, Brentano’s restriction on immediately evident judgements seems ad hoc. Brentano could use it to distinguish between the judgements of inner perception and memory judgements. Both announce their own correctness and are not justified by further reasons.

Stumpf (Erkenntnislehre, 215–19) would go even further than Meinong. He argued that outer perception is immediately evident. But in expounding his reasons for this extension he (Erkenntnislehre, 218) endorsed the Cartesian slogan: ‘Everything that I perceive clearly and distinctly is true’. According to Stumpf (Erkenntnislehre, 39), there is an experience of truth (Erleben der Wahrheit) and if one judges that p because one experienced that p is true, one makes an immediately evident judgement. At this point Brentanians no longer extended Brentano’s conception of evidence but switched to a truth-based one.

11. Conclusion

If the alethic view of intuitive judgement is not the only game in town, its proponents will need to present arguments in its support and cannot simply expect us to accept it. With Brentano’s view in mind, we can raise questions like: Do we really sometimes directly see the truth, or is this just a confused way of talking about our direct knowledge about what is the right thing to think in a situation? Do we need both the alethic and the normative view, or will one of them cover all intuitive judgements that we make? While answering these questions is beyond the scope of this paper, I hope to have given us reasons to pursue them.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Maria Rosa Antognazza and Marco Segala for very helpful feedback. Many thanks also to the anonymous referees for constructive criticism.

Notes

1 Brentano in fact discussed these passages in his “Reid”, 6.

2 A notable exception is work on linguistic intuitions that identifies them with experiences of the valences of strings. You have the intuition that ‘Buffalo buffalo buffalo’ is not OK or not right. See Maynes and Gross (“Linguistic Intuitions”, 716).

3 See Wedgewood (Normativity, 157).

4 See also Brentano (Richtigen Urteil, 111). In general, I have avoided quoting from posthumously published lecture notes and manuscripts like Richtigen Urteil where the editorial contribution is not clearly marked. My main claims are supported by published works or letters.

5 Sometimes ‘believe in’ is used to express a positive evaluative attitude (‘I believe in love’), but often we use it to convey our ontological commitments.

6 The translators translate ‘an ein Object glauben’ incorrectly as ‘believing something’ and thereby obscure the notion Brentano has in mind.

7 For an independent argument that believing in a is not the same thing as believing that a exists, see Gendler Szabó (“Believing in Things”, 593–4).

8 See also Brentano (True and Evident, 39 [45]).

9 See Brentano (Ethics, 87 [139]).

10 See Brentano (“Concept of Truth”, § 42–3).

11 See Brentano (Ethics, 84–5 [135]).

12 Brentano rejected judgement contents in his last so-called reistic phase. In this phase of his work, there are no longer any propositional contents or states of affairs that have to-be-acknowledgedness. My remarks above are therefore restricted to the time Brentano accepted contents.

13 Bar-Hillel (“Primary Truth Bearers”, 304) rediscovered this point; see also MacFarlane (Assessment Sensitivity, 47). For the importance of the process/product distinction for an understanding of truth and truth-bearer, see (Moltmann, “Propositions”).

14 See, for example, Brentano (Right and Wrong, Fn. 25, p. 73 [59]).

15 I have changed the translation. The English translators got the German expression wrong: it is not ‘antreffend beurteilen’, but ‘zutreffend beurteilen’ and ‘zutreffend’ means ‘correct’ or ‘right’.

16 See Brentano (Richtigen Urteilen, 193).

17 When Brentanians like Hillebrand (see his Schlüsse, 6) and Kraus (see his Wege und Abwege, 21) write about immediately evident judgement, they straightaway mention that these are characterized as correct. In contrast, the property of being characterized as correct is not mentioned in the discussions of Brentano’s view of immediate evidence by Künne (Truth, 378), Kriegel (Brentano’s Philosophical System, 136) and van der Schaar (Truth and Evidence, 195–6). Kriegel reads Brentano as taking immediately evident judgement to be conceptually primitive, but he (Brentano’s Philosophical System, 141) proposes to improve Brentano’s view by construing self-evidence as a ‘particular acute’ instance of correctness (‘fittingness’). As we will see, this is not an emendation of Brentano’s view, but in fact comes close to what Brentano actually proposed.

18 Chisholm translated ‘als richtig characterisiert’ as ‘manifested as being correct’. Since the German ‘characterisiert’ and ‘characterised’ are in effect derived from the same French word and if there are differences in meaning between them, they are minimal. So why not translate ‘als richtig charakterisiert’ as ‘characterised as correct’?

19 See Brentano (Versuch, 253).

20 See, for example, Smith (“Self-Consciousness”).

21 On the primary/secondary object distinction see Brentano (Psychology, 128 [I, 180]).

22 Brentano knew Reid’s philosophy in detail, see his “Reid”.

23 See also Brentano (Ethics, 90 [83]).

24 My translation. See also Brentano (Versuch, 150).

25 See Oskar Kraus introduction to (True and Evident, xxv [xxvii]). See also (Parsons, “Judgement and Truth”, 189–90); Chisholm (Intrinsic Value, 39–40) and Kriegel (Brentano’s Philosophical System, 140).

26 My modus tollens is Chisholm’s modus ponens. In a manuscript Brentano wrote that ‘[t]ruth pertains to the judgement of the person who judges correctly’ (True and Evident, 82 [[139]). I read Brentano as saying that if a person judges correctly, their judgement is true. Without providing textual justification Chisholm (Intrinsic Value, 39) turns Brentano’s sufficient condition of truth into that is necessary and sufficient condition.

27 See Brentano (Versuch, 151; 158, 161–3).