Reflections on Judgment in the Age of AI: Problem Formation, Aesthetic Judgment, and the Education of Judgment

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Artificial intelligence is altering the production of candidate problems, candidate solutions, and scholarly outputs at the same time. Search, synthesis, hypothesis generation, proof search, coding, analysis, and writing can increasingly be scaled through machine assistance, while their material, experimental, and epistemic costs remain uneven across domains. This essay considers what this redistribution of scarcity may mean for the evolution of scholarship. It approaches judgment as a plural practice that enters inquiry before, during, and after solution. Drawing on Dewey, Peirce, and Kuhn, the discussion treats problem formation as part of inquiry itself: problems acquire form through attention, inherited expectations, encounters, and acts of selection. Kant's accounts of reflective and aesthetic judgment then provide a point of departure for examining how a possible problem can acquire aesthetic salience before its utility or broader significance is known. Weber, Berlin, and Arendt support a further move toward plural forms of judgment and the mediation of aesthetic, epistemic, normative, practical, economic, and historical considerations. The educational discussion brings this framework to classics, contingency, and AI-assisted learning. Classics and disciplinary traditions condense prior judgments and make anomalies intelligible; encounters with an unfinished world can revise inherited problem-spaces. AI enters this circulation as a generator, solver, evaluator, and increasingly capable participant in inquiry. The essay proposes that judgment education should cultivate participation in the formation, comparison, mediation, and revision of problem-spaces as scholarship becomes increasingly abundant in both questions and answers.