The second among the classes of truth are the immediate judgments containing truths which are derived from direct experience through internal and external sense-perceptions.
Here are examples: 'That lady waling along the street has a package under her arm.' 'That boy is running.' 'I have a pain in my tooth.' 'I am thinking and writing.' Such judgments refer to individual concrete facts, events, persons, and objects. We do not arrive at the truth of these judgments through a mere analysis of the ideas contained in them. Take the judgment, 'That boy is running.'
On comparing the ideas 'boy' and 'running' alone by themselves, independent of experience, I cannot know whether I should unite them into a judgment, because there is no necessary connection between the ideas 'boy' and 'running'; the boy might just as well be 'standing' or 'sitting' or 'walking.' That I actually judge, 'That boy is running,' is due to my actual experience of seeing him run. Such judgments, then, are not analytical but synthetic; they contain empirical truths, based on direct experience.
As such, therefore, they are not considered to be universal, necessary, and absolute truths; they are contingent and experiential truths which may change with changing circumstances. A comparison between this and the foregoing group of judgments will reveal at a glance that the synthetic judgments have by no means the general truth-value of the analytical judgments, so far as knowledge is concerned.
Coming up next on Epistemology Today blog:
Classes of Truth: The Mediate Judgments to Attain Truth
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