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Suspending Judgment is Something You Do

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2022

Lindsay Crawford
Lindsay Crawford*
Affiliation:
Connecticut College, CT, USA
*
Email: lcrawfo1@conncoll.edu
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Abstract

What is it to suspend judgment about whether p? Much of the recent work on the nature and normative profile of suspending judgment aims to analyze it as a kind of doxastic attitude. On some of these accounts, suspending judgment about whether p partly consists in taking up a certain higher-order belief about one's deficient epistemic position with respect to whether p. On others, suspending judgment about whether p consists in taking up a sui generis attitude, one that takes the question of whether p? as its content. In this paper, I defend an account on which suspending judgment about whether p is not a matter of taking up a doxastic attitude, but rather a way of intentionally omitting to judge whether p. I then close with a discussion of how an account like mine, which sees suspending judgment as fundamentally practical, rather than doxastic, can accommodate what appear to be distinctively epistemic reasons to suspend judgment.

Keywords

Suspending judgmentbeliefomissionintentionepistemic normativity
Type
Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 19 , Special Issue 4: Jamaica conference special issue , December 2022 , pp. 561 - 577
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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