The Inevitability of Pre‑Judgment Structure — The Foundational Basis for Analysis and Understanding in Human Sciences —

Analytical, descriptive, and interpretive practices in the humanities, social sciences, and human sciences inevitably rely on acts of judgment. However, the conditions fixed prior to judgment—such as what information is adopted, which criteria are applied, and within what scope judgment is conducted—have rarely been treated as explicit analytical units. Instead, they have been handled implicitly as background assumptions or methodological premises.

This paper argues that these pre-judgment conditions are not new theoretical requirements but structural facts already presupposed in existing theories and practices. By making pre-judgment structure explicit, the paper aims to clarify the foundational conditions that enable self-understanding and mutual understanding in human sciences. Normative evaluation and value judgments are excluded; the focus is solely on the structural conditions that make analysis and understanding possible.