388 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters . 
bias jours. My conception is merely a preliminary datum, a 
theme, a topic. Had you asked me “Of what shall we think V\ 
I might have answered “Lemons.” In precisely the same spirit 
I might answer “The truth (or, it may be, the untruth) of lemon 
to exceed orange.” The conception then is far from being a 
verdict., or say a judgment. It is merely that upon which a 
judgment may be formed; or perhaps it would be better to say: 
it is a mere beginning, which will become a judgment when com¬ 
pleted by an element of acceptance, endorsement, or say belief. 
Of, to change my figure, the members of a judgment are assem¬ 
bled ; but the breath of life is not yet in them. 
b. the oedinary judgment (expressed by a statement). 
Its essential content. 
The forming of a judgment is commonly held to be, or at least 
to contain, a mental act of knowing. But I prefer to follow the 
hint, confessedly unreliable, offered by language-history. Look¬ 
ing backward, I find that, the primary meaning of “sententia” 
was “an opinion.” The sentence might then be defined as an 
opinion or, more exactly, the expression of an opinion. Since 
what is expressed by a sentence is commonly also called a judg¬ 
ment, the hint is given to regard all judgments as opinions; and 
this it; seems to me is safer than to think of them as knowledge. 
For what is supposed to be knowledge, in the ordinary sense, 
is often found to be no knowledge. 
The word opinion itself is not however fully adequate. It 
names a mental status as much too weak, as knowledge is too 
strong. I prefer as a rule the word belief, by which I mean the 
act of knowing, but without distinction between knowing rightly 
and knowing wrongly, the latter being an extra-linguistic acci¬ 
dent. Indeed I expect, to use “to-believe” and “to-know” as 
synonymous, choosing the former when greater distinctness is 
required, and preferring the latter when its greater convention¬ 
ality favors the momentary need. Accordingly what is expressed 
by a sentence, in other words a judgment, I regard as consisting 
essentially of belief in a conception. 
I neglect moreover unbelief, in the sense of failure to reach 
belief. I also at present pass over disbelief—an embarrassing 
quasi-synonym for belief in the untruth of thought. It is well 
