Friedman on suspended judgment
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Friedman on suspended judgment Michal Masny1 Received: 4 October 2017 / Accepted: 20 September 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract In a recent series of papers, Jane Friedman argues that suspended judgment is a sui generis first-order attitude, with a question (rather than a proposition) as its content. In this paper, I offer a critique of Friedman’s project. I begin by responding to her arguments against reductive higher-order propositional accounts of suspended judgment, and thus undercut the negative case for her own view. Further, I raise worries about the details of her positive account, and in particular about her claim that one suspends judgment about some matter if and only if one inquires into this matter. Subsequently, I use conclusions drawn from the preceding discussion to offer a tentative account: S suspends judgment about p iff (i) S believes that she neither believes nor disbelieves that p, (ii) S neither believes nor disbelieves that p, and (iii) S intends to judge that p or not-p. Keywords Friedman · Suspension of judgment · Suspended judgment · Agnosticism · Inquiry · Belief · Interrogative attitude
1 Introduction What is the nature of the mental state picked out in ascriptions such as “Ada is agnostic about the existence of God” or “Adam suspends judgment about when the bus will arrive”? Plausibly, this mental state is often present when an agent searches for knowledge. Suspending on some matter seems also in some way at odds with having beliefs about that matter. But the details are elusive. In a recent series of papers, Jane Friedman argues that suspended judgment is a sui generis, first-order, question-directed attitude. This proposal is yet to be properly addressed in the literature. To understand Friedman’s position, we need to appreciate the entirety of her project because her later papers build on the upshots of the previous ones. In “Suspended Judg-
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Michal Masny [email protected] Philosophy Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
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ment” (2013a), Friedman is most concerned with what suspended judgment is not. In particular, she argues against a range of ‘non-belief plus’ accounts, where the term non-belief refers to a mental state of neither believing nor disbelieving some proposition. These accounts include mere non-belief, non-belief plus having considered the matter, and non-belief for epistemic reasons. She concludes that suspended judgment cannot just be a matter of absence of some mental states, but must be a genuine attitude. In “Question-Directed Attitudes” (2013b), Friedman argues against a range of firstorder and higher-order propositional accounts of this mental state. Their alleged failure, in addition to linguistic considerations, leads her to conclude that suspended judgment is a sui generis first-order question-directed attitude, and hence belongs to a class of Interrogative Attitudes (IAs). The difference between interrogative and propositional attitudes is that the former have questions, not propositions, as their conten
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