The trials, in the field of logic, are those acts by which an existence is affirmed or denied, linking two terms with the verb ‘to be’.
Judgments are an essential question in epistemology and logic, as they are an essential part of the reasonings, which are precisely the combinations of many trials. As in grammar and parsing, in philosophy the two terms are called subject and predicate.
One of the most frequent classifications among trials is the one that imposed Immanuel Kant, who defined in his most famous work, Critique of Pure Reason, that these judgments could be analytical judgments or synthetic judgments.
Analytical judgments
The analytical judgments They are those that have the concept of predicate contained in the subject, and a relationship of belonging and identity is produced. If the judgments are the characterization of a subject, this subject, however, already has some properties in itself: when the judgment precisely highlights one of them, it is that it is an analytical one.
Analytical judgments relate to syllogisms (since something happens for all A, and that this particular one is also A, then it turns out that something happens for this case as well).
Examples of analytical judgments
- ‘All bodies are extensive’: this is the definition that Kant himself proposes when he introduces the concept. Since the extension is a property of the bodies, it is then that it can be deduced directly from the subject.
- ‘A circle is that which is inside a circumference’
- ‘Salt is salty’
- ‘Every Monday is Monday’
- ‘Singles are not married’
- ‘The color black is black’
- ‘Tuesday is a weekday’
- ‘All red roses are red’
- ‘The whole is greater than the parts it contains’
- ‘Triangles have three sides’
- ‘A square is made up of four equal sides’
- ‘Ice is water in a solid state’
Synthetic judgments
In opposition, synthetic judgments They are those in which the subject does not understand the predicate, nor does it have any relationship that is eloquent. It is then said that in synthetic judgments the predicate contributes something that is not contained in the subject.
Another way to define synthetic judgments is to think of those that can be replaced by their affirmative version (adding the word ‘not’ before the verb ‘to be’), and in that case they do not fall into an incoherence.
Examples of synthetic judgments
- ‘Every body is heavy’ Analogous to analytical judgments, this is the central example that Kant himself exposes of this type of judgment.
- ‘The month of February is the one that begins when January ends’
- ‘The table is brown’
- ‘The sum of the squares of the sides is equal to the square of the hypotenuse at a right angle’.
- ‘Not all roses are red’
- ‘My brother is the one dressed in a gray T-shirt’
- ‘Dogs are animals that people tend to have in their homes’
- ‘The President is the most important man in the country’
- ‘Hands are extremities of the human body’
- ‘Spring is a season of the year’
- ‘The empanadas from that place are very tasty’
- ‘This magician’s tricks are copies of those made by one from abroad’
Judgments a priori and a posteriori
An additional consideration is the one you made some time after Popper, who synthesized the division between the two types of judgments, and added a question: while analytical judgments can only be analyzed a priori (that is, with the sole elaboration of the judgment and the ‘filter’ through reason), the Synthetic judgments are detected a posteriori, that is, by virtue of experience.
Much of the logic debate used to check if there are synthetic judgments that can also be revealed a priori. Finally, it is the synthetic judgments that provide progress for the world, since they complement each other and elaborate the aforementioned reasoning.