I look out of the window and see that it rains. I judge that it rains. Now my colleague Thomas Fossen (in his new book, Facing Authority) tells me that judgement is different depending on practical consequences. My judgement that the Putin regime is illegitimate is not the same as a Russian person’s judgement that the Putin regime is illegitimate, because it has wildly different consequences for the two us. (Extremely minor ones in my case, potentially much bigger ones in their case.) There’s certainly something to this, but in order to understand it better, I want to investigate the simple example of rain. There is surely something different about my judgement in the case where (a) I’ll be spending the rest of the day inside, and (b) I need to go out for a walk soon. In one case it is just a off-hand observation. In the other case, it has an immediate impact. I’m irritated. I consider whether I really need to go out. I resolve to take an umbrella. I remember that one of my pairs of shoes has a small hole in the sole, so I shouldn’t wear those. And so on.

But how to understand this difference? Here are three options (which crucially do not exhaust all the possibilities):

1. The content of the judgement is different; for instance, what I judge to be true in these two cases are different propositions.
2. The content is identical, but the act of judgement is different. I judge the same content, but in a different way.
3. The act of judgement and the content are identical, there are just different effects.

None of these options seems prima facie very satisfying. Let us consider them in turn. The content of the judgement seems to be “it is raining” in both cases; or, as all philosophers who insist on the timelessness of truth would say, “it is raining at time t in place p“. (This difference is important, and I will return to it.) Now if two people are looking out of the same window, and both say “it is raining”, then surely we want to be able to say that they agree with each other. And they agree even if one of them is staying inside and the other is going out. But if the content of their judgement is different, than it is hard to see how they could be said to agree. This makes the content option undesirable.

The second option suffers from being vague. Surely I can ‘do’ different things with the same content. I can judge it. I can wonder about it. I can entertain it. I can disbelieve it. But none of that is happening here; we want both cases to be cases of judgement. So unless we hear more about what the act of judgement is like, and how there can be different versions of it, this option isn’t a live one.

The third option may seem to be the most common sense one. What happens in judgement is the exact same thing; but if I have to go out, this judgement immediately triggers some other thoughts and feelings, whereas if I don’t have to go out, it does not. Same judgement, different effects. But the problem with this option is that it isolates judgement from practice in a way that does not seem legitimate. (I’m using the verb ‘seem’ a lot, because I’m grasping in the dark.) The moral philosopher who writes a paper concluding that we have the same duties towards people in other countries as we do towards people in our own country, is surely not doing the same thing as the prime minister about to sign a far-reaching open border policy judging the ‘same’ thing. That’s a dramatic example, but when I’m idly looking out of the window and seeing that some drops are falling, and I judge that it rains; then surely I’m not doing the same thing as when I’m looking out of the window in order to determine whether my planned picnic with the woman of my dreams can take place, given that we agreed to go picnicking “unless it rains”. And if those two are not the same thing, then isn’t there also a difference, albeit more slight, between the two situation I originally described? The very need to make a decision to take or not take an umbrella surely colours my conception of ‘rain’.

One thing we could do is go contextualist about epistemic criteria: in cases with practical importance, I need stronger (or weaker) evidence before concluding that it rains. It’s like Dretske’s ‘painted mule’ example, where in ordinary contexts I need little evidence to know that the animal over there is a zebra, but there are contexts — discussion of scepticism, maybe, but perhaps also contexts where it is extremely important that I have a real zebra — where I need extra evidence that it is not a painted mule. But this would just raise or lower the threshold for judgement. And it seems that practical considerations have a somewhat different impact; that thresholds for belief don’t exhaust the way in which the practical is involved in judgement. When I’m considering my picnic, the point is not that I need more evidence about how much water is coming down from the sky. The point is that judgement becomes a more complicated process. It might even involve calling the woman of my dreams in order to discuss with her whether it does or does not rain; it’s something I can no longer find out on my own! Well, that fits extremely nicely with what Fossen says on page 8, in the introduction: “judgment is cast here as an ongoing, open-ended, and intersubjective practice.”

So I just need to go on and read more of his book, don’t I?