Hi Harold,
Drat! I thought this one at least was straightforward. I can see where you are going with your approach. It aligns with the idea that 'judgements' as in Law are recorded and hence public information 'objects' (no pun intended), and this contrasts with 'decision-making' as a human process.
An alternative, which is the direction I had been following has 'judgement' as a distinctly human element of decision making. ('a mental act or attitude of decision by which the process of observation, comparison and rationcination is terminated' as put in a rather old fashioned way by Webster Comprehensive Encyclopedic Edition (1986)). Thus, from this perspective decision-making is a broader process that can include all sorts of activities like informationa gathering, analysis, discussion, lobbying, reflection etc. but in the limit, it requires a particularly unique human internal process involving reflexive activity between imagogenic, emotional, feeling and selfconscious processes that result in a preference for a particular outcome as a result of individuals' bodies feeling better or worse. This is a pretty unique biological process as it creates a real and releatively reliable singular outcome from reflecting on situations that may involve complex objects, relationships, contexts, perspectives - physical, social and historical. This is a 'holy grail' of optimisation models such as multicriteria, weighting methods. If the word 'judgement' is not used for this human activity that contributes to decision-making (and it is fairly standard in psychological/cognitive analyses) then we need some other word that is at least as good. Any ideas?
Best wishes,
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From: Harold Nelson
Sent: 18/08/2003 12:33 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Judgment and Decision-making
Dear Lubomir et al
At present I am working on a project developing a course on judgment
and decision making for a graduate program in Strategic Planning for
Critical Infrastructures. The distinction I make between judgment and
decision making is based on the work I am doing with Erik Stolterman.
It is based on the understanding that these two distinctions represent
two types of knowledge. The first type is a form of knowledge that can
be separated from the decision maker, has application to other
situations, can be communicated to other decision makers, can be stored
in information systems etc. The second type of knowledge cannot be
separated from the knower and has no instrumental value outside of the
situation for which it was produced and is only revealed through the
actions of the judgment maker. Learning how to make good judgments then
becomes a very different enterprise from learning to make good
decisions.
Harold
