Working definition. Judgment is the passage from what can be known to what must be chosen. It weighs evidence and values in a particular situation, then accepts the incompleteness of the decision.
Inherited meaning
Practical philosophy distinguished judgment from calculation because human situations do not arrive with every relevant value already commensurable. Law, medicine, art, and politics all depend on trained judgment precisely where general rules meet irreducible particulars.
Meaning in the imagination economy
AI can rank, predict, and recommend, but those operations do not remove the need to decide what counts as success, which harms matter, or when an exception is justified. As machine competence rises, judgment becomes easier to hide behind output and more important to name. It is where epistemic uncertainty becomes ethical responsibility.
What changes in practice
Separate the model’s recommendation from the human decision. Record the values and uncertainties that shaped the choice. Preserve a path for challenge and revision, especially when the people bearing the consequences did not make the judgment.