Abstract
A good account of the agnostic attitude of Suspending Judgement should explain how it can be rendered more or less rational/justified according to the state of one’s evidence—and one’s relation to that evidence. I argue that the attitude of suspending judgement whether p constitutively involves having a belief; roughly, a belief that one cannot yet tell whether or not p. I show that a theory of suspending that treats it as a sui generis attitude, wholly distinct from belief, struggles to account for how suspension of judgement can be rendered more or less rational (or irrational) by one’s evidence. I also criticise the related idea that suspension essentially requires an ‘Inquiring Attitude’. I show how a belief-based theory, in contrast, neatly accounts for the rational and epistemic features of suspending and so neatly accounts for why an agnostic has a genuine neutral opinion concerning the question whether p, as opposed to simply having no opinion.
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Notes
Rosenkranz (2007) is certainly an extended and highly sophisticated elaboration of a specific belief-based account of agnosticism. However, Rosenkranz is not concerned with defending the basic assumption that agnosticism essentially involves some kind of commitment or belief that we are not in a position to know either that p or that not-p. Rosenkranz simply takes this for granted in the course of explicating what he calls ‘true agnosticism’, which is, roughly, the view that we will continue to be ignorant as to whether p in all future states of information that we could reach using present methods. Rosenkranz’s position is briefly discussed further in Sects. 2 and 5.
The position I will be arguing for – that suspension essentially involves a belief about what one can currently tell– extends pretty straightforwardly, I think, to states of suspending-wh, where the question being suspended about is not just the truth/falsity of a single proposition, but is a question for which many propositions are potential candidate answers.
I’ll assume for simplicity that DBp ↔ B¬p.
Many thanks to an anonymous referee for this journal for pressing me to clarify this.
Of course, for certain purposes the notions of justification and rationality may come apart. But so far as the arguments of this paper are concerned we will not need to distinguish between them too carefully.
I include this clause so as not to assume evidentialism about justification/rationality – i.e. that one’s evidence exhaustively determines the epistemic justification/rationality of one’s doxastic attitudes. I leave open here that there may be other factors, in addition to one’s evidence, that may be relevant to epistemic justification/rationality.
Notice though: even if (CR) does not state a necessary condition on suspending judgement, perhaps having a credence of around 0.5 can be a sufficient condition for one way of suspending whether p. See the possibility of ‘disjunctive’ theories discussed below.
Scott Sturgeon (forthcoming) also endorses a version of the Sui Generis option.
Notice that this complex state, consisting of both the meta-cognitive belief and the doxastic neutrality where the former is the subject’s reason for the latter, is different from a version of the NON-BELIEF view, discussed in Sect. 2, which Friedman (2013a) argued against. That NON-BELIEF view was that suspending judgement consisted simply in the state of doxastic neutrality, but with an added necessary pre-condition that this neutral state is maintained for ‘epistemic reasons’. Friedman objected, correctly, that a subject may lose or forget her reasons for suspending and yet still be suspending. But this is not a problem for the complex state being proposed here. For it is certainly possible for the subject to lose her reasons for being in this overall complex state, whilst still being in the complex state. All that is required is that within the complex state of suspending judgement, one constituent—the meta-cognitive belief—is the subject’s reason for the other constituent—the doxastic neutrality.
Again, I am very grateful to an anonymous referee for this journal for pressing me to clarify this point.
See, for example, Neta (forthcoming).
Again, I am assuming that the contents of these attitudes are sufficiently fine-grained to rule out Frege-style cases where a subject rationally believes one claim and suspends about another claim that is, in fact, equivalent.
See Sorensen (2009), who uses the label ‘meta-agnosticism’, for further discussion.
I cannot vouch for the historical accuracy of applying the label ‘Pyrrhonian’ to these theses! I only mean to suggest that, rightly or wrongly, these kinds of theses will naturally invoke the idea of Pyrhonnian epoché in many modern readers.
I say ‘appears’ as the phrase ‘in general’ is ambiguous between ‘most of the time’ and ‘in total exception-less generality’.
I am assuming, as I take to be widely accepted, that there is some important, constitutive link between the notions of truth and justification. E.g. Earl Connee states: ‘the existence of some special intimate connection between epistemic justification and truth seems to be beyond reasonable doubt’ (Conee 1992, p. 657). However, such a link has been denied by Pollock and Cruz (2004).
Note—Friedman wants to say that this ‘decision’ as to whether we already know the answer to Q occurs as part of a pre-suspension/pre-inquiry stage in the process. But it is not clear why considering whether we already know the answer to Q should not count as genuine inquiry, but only as pre-inquiry.
See also Archer (2018) for criticisms of Friedman’s proposals that overlap, to some extent, with the criticisms I make here.
See Sorensen (1987) for criticism of Conee’s proposal.
Though credited to Kripke, the paradox is first reported by Harman (1973, p. 148).
Though, to repeat, that would certainly not mean that Friedman’s rich account of Inquiring Attitudes would then be of no further interest!.
As well as being presented at the conference on Reasonable Doubt at Birkbeck College, material from this paper was presented at events in Oslo, Barcelona, St. Andrews, Cambridge, Cologne, and at meetings of the European Epistemology Network in Madrid and in Paris. I am grateful to the audiences on all those occasions for their feedback. By far my biggest debts of gratitude are to Anna-Maria Eder and to Julien Dutant, both of whom generously provided me with extensive written comments which really transformed this paper and which saved me from a number of embarrassing mistakes. Of course they should not be assumed to endorse any of the views advanced here, nor are they responsible for any errors and infelicities that remain. Many thanks also to Bill Brewer, Peter Brössel, Jessica Brown, Jonathan Knowles, Clayton Littlejohn, Anders Nes, Carlota Serrahima, Justin Snedgar, Jan Willem Wieland and Timothy Williamson for helpful advice and criticism. I am very grateful to two anonymous referees for this journal, whose insightful reports substantially improved this paper. Finally, I would like to thank Jane Friedman, whose fascinating papers on suspending judgement originally led me into this topic. Research on this paper has been supported by an Emmy Noether Grant from the German Research Council (DFG), reference number BR 5210/1-1.
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Raleigh, T. Suspending is believing. Synthese 198, 2449–2474 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02223-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02223-8