JUDGMENT

in the first Critique, the use of the understanding by which an object is determined to be empirically real, through a synthesis of intuitions and concepts. The third Critique examines the form of our feelings of pleasure and displeasure in order to construct a system based on the faculty of judgment (= the judicial standpoint) in its aesthetic and teleological manifestations. (Cf. reason.)

[L:106] Under the heading "explanation of a judgment as such", Kant writes "a judgment is the presentation of the unity of the consciousness of several presentations", which is to say that judgment is the faculty by which intuitions and concepts are synthesized together to form experience. (As Kant puts it, "to every judgment belong, as it essential components, matter and form. The matter of judgment consists in given cognition"--intuitions--"that are joined into unity of consciousness" [i.e., are so joined through the act of judging]; "in the determination of the matter in which various presentations as such belong to one consciousness consists the form of the judgment" [namely, concepts which this determine exactly how intuitions are synthesized together (concepts as rules for synthesis)]. [A68/B93] As Kant puts it, the only use of concepts is in judgment; "the only use which the understanding can make of...concepts is to judge by means of them". [A132/B171] Again, Kant writes that "if understanding in general is to be viewed as the faculty of rules"--and thus concepts are viewed as rules (namely, of synthesis)--"judgment will be the faculty of subsuming under rules"--i.e., of subsuming various given intuitions under concepts--"...that is, of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand under a given rule"--whether or no the intuitions are to be synthesized according to that rule, synthesized as falling under that concept.