The Origin of JudgmentIntroductionThe guiding thesis of Experience and Judgment is that logic requires a foundational theory of experience, which at the lowest level is described as prepredicative or prelinguistic.1 Edmund Husserl pursues within that text a phenomenological elucidation of the origin of judgment so that it can clarify the essence of predicative judgment. He does so in the belief that an investigation into the form of prepredicative experience will show that it is the foundation of the structure of predicative thought, and therefore the origin of general conceptual thought. From the beginning, Husserl considers the problematic of logic as being twofold: on the one hand there is the question of the constitution of forms of judgment and their laws; and on the other that of the subjective conditions of reaching evidence.2 He gives his investigation of this problematic in Experience and Judgment a tripartite structure, where each part corresponds to a different level of experience. This article will loosely mirror Husserl's division, beginning with an articulation of what Husserl means by the prepredicative domain of experience. This will be followed by an examination of the origins of judgment in the prepredicative context. Finally it will address simple predicative judgment and briefly discuss how Husserl sees such judgment as progress towards knowledge and universal judgment. Everything will be preceded, however, by a brief introduction to the topics of Experience and Judgment. In Part I of Experience and Judgment, Husserl proceeds with an analysis of the “passive” data of experience. It is here that Husserl hopes to show what he calls the “prepredicative” conditions of preaching as such. These prepredicative conditions underlie every act of objective experience, such that these structures ultimately find the distinct forms of judgment one would encounter at the level of formal logic. Part II concerns the structure of predicative thought as such; that is, it is concerned with the origin of predicative forms of judgment in prepredicative experience. Husserl argues that at the level of predicative thought the "objectivities of understanding" are realized in acts of categorical judgment, which form the logical structures necessary for the foundation of a formal logic. The origin of general conceptual thinking is covered in Part III. The process of isolating forms of judgment from the data of subjective experience already given, begun in Part II, is continued here.