2. Rejecting the Question

Besides believing that p, disbelieving that p and being on the fence as to whether p, one can also reject the question whether p. Let me reach that conclusion in a step-by-step manner.

Consider the idiom ‘What is your stance regarding …?’. We can substitute not only ‘whether’-complements for the ellipsis in that linguistic context, but also any other interrogative complements, such as ‘where’-, ‘who’-, ‘what’- and ‘how’-complements. Not only can a person have a stance on whether The Strokes are playing tonight, for example, they can also have a stance regarding where The Strokes are playing tonight, and a stance regarding who is going to the concert, etc.

Now consider: What is your stance regarding how bananas fly?

It isn’t, I take it, the stance of believing that bananas fly by flapping their wings, or anything of the sort. Neither are you on the fence or divided regarding how bananas fly. In fact, you deny that bananas fly, which is a presupposition of the question under discussion (see Belnap and Steel Reference Belnap and Steel1976 and van Fraassen Reference van Fraassen1980 for this notion of presupposition). So you reject the question how bananas fly, and that is your stance on it. From your perspective, the question itself is defective, in that no direct answer to it can be true.

The direct answers to the question of how bananas fly are answers that explain how bananas fly. You don’t believe any such answer. You actually disbelieve or at least you are disposed to disbelieve any of them (there are infinitely many). What you do have, however, is a corrective answer to the target question, namely: that bananas do not fly. But that you have a corrective answer to the question (as opposed to a direct one) just means that, from your perspective, the question itself calls for correction.

Something similar can be said about the question when David Hume wrote the Critique of Pure Reason, the question who squared the circle, and the question why everyone loves McDonalds. If you are like me, you reject all these questions, for you take it that they rely on false presuppositions.Footnote ²

One can reject a question by denying its presuppositions—and that is one kind of stance that one can have with respect to it, alongside the stances of believing one of the question’s direct answers or being on the fence as to which of them is true.

That doesn’t yet show us that the traditional taxonomy of attitudes is not inclusive enough—at least not directly. For the traditional taxonomy is offered as an answer to the question which kinds of doxastic stance one can have regarding whether p (and not regarding why it is that p, or when it became the case that p, etc.). The complement ‘whether p’ expresses what semanticists call a polar question, that is, a yes-or-no question. But the interrogative complements explored in the previous paragraphs express non-polar questions (see Roelofsen Reference Roelofsen and Aronoff2019). Unlike polar questions, non-polar questions admit of more than just two direct answers.

But we are just one step away from attacking the traditional taxonomy.

For now we just have to observe that subjects can reject polar questions, too. I can reject the question whether Alice likes porridge, for example. The Alice in question is the Alice from Alice in Wonderland. No mention is made in Lewis Carroll’s work of fiction as to how Alice stands with respect to porridge. That is why I reject the question. (See Kroon and Voltolini Reference Kroon, Voltolini, Zalta and Nodelman2023 for an overview of the literature on fictional entities and the semantics of fictional names.)

I do not believe that Alice likes porridge. I do not disbelieve that Alice likes porridge, or believe that she doesn’t. And I am not on the fence as to whether Alice likes porridge, either. I am not divided between treating the proposition that Alice likes porridge as true and treating it as false. From my perspective, there is no fact of the matter as to whether Alice likes porridge—so there is nothing for me to be in doubt about here. I rather treat the proposition that Alice likes porridge as neither true nor false.Footnote ³

So I reject the question whether Alice likes porridge, and that is my stance on it.

Other examples of the phenomenon are possible which do not hinge on the rejector’s views about fiction or the ontology of fictional characters. One can reject the question whether Jack is bald, for example, on account of one’s thinking that Jack is a borderline case of baldness. One can reject the question whether there is going to be a third world war, because one thinks that the future is less than fully determined by the past (future contingents).

It may be a mistake for one to reject any of these questions, of course—but that doesn’t invalidate the point, namely, that rejecting the question whether p is a possible stance for one to have regarding whether p (compare: p doesn’t have to be true or supported by the evidence in order for one to believe that p).

So, again, in addition to believing that p, disbelieving that p and being divided as to whether p, one can also reject the question whether p. That makes four different categorical attitudes that one can have regarding whether p.

3. What all Cases of Question-Rejection Have in Common

Which features do all cases of question-rejection have in common? What is it that unifies its various instances?

In the previous section, initial examples of question-rejection were given which featured non-polar questions, for example, the question of how bananas fly. In examples of this kind, the subject rejects the question because they take it to rely on false presuppositions. Then further examples of question-rejection were introduced where the subject does not take the question to rely on false presuppositions—and these were examples involving polar questions.

So taking the question to rely on false presuppositions is not a feature that is shared by all cases of question-rejection.

To make the point clearer, let us say again that I reject the question whether Jack is bald. I identify Jack as a borderline case of baldness and I think that there is no fact of the matter as to whether he is bald. The question whether Jack is bald relies on the presupposition that either Jack is bald or Jack is not bald. But I do not take that presupposition to be false. It is just that, from my perspective, that presupposition is not true. In fact, I treat the target presupposition as if it were neither true nor false.

Is this then a feature that is shared by all cases of question-rejection, namely, that the subject takes the question to rely on a presupposition that fails to be true (even though it need not actually be false)? That gets closer, but it is not quite there yet.

A supervaluationist might think that the target disjunction is true, for example, even though neither of its disjuncts are true. That is, they take the presupposition that either Jack is bald or Jack is not bald to be true, while at the same time regarding both the answer that Jack is bald and the answer that Jack is not bald as not true (these answers are neither true nor false). Our supervaluationist identifies truth with supertruth and, whereas the disjunction is supertrue, neither of its disjuncts are supertrue (see Fine Reference Fine1975, Lewis Reference Lewis1982).

To be more precise and inclusive, then, the feature that is shared by all cases of question-rejection, no matter whether involving a polar or a non-polar question, is that the subject treats the question as if it there weren’t any true direct answers to it.

And here we see that rejecting a question isn’t just abstaining from holding any attitude, either. For, when one simply abstains from holding any stance on the question whatsoever, one is not treating the question as if there were no true answers to it. In the example from the previous section, I treat both, the answer that Alice likes porridge and the answer that Alice does not like porridge as if they were neither true nor false, therefore not true. And those two propositions are the only direct answers to the question whether Alice likes porridge. Similarly, in rejecting the question whether Jack is bald, I treat both the answer that Jack is bald and the answer that Jack is not bald as if they were not true. And those are the only two direct answers to the question whether Jack is bald. In either case, the corresponding question doesn’t admit of a true direct answer, as seen from my own perspective.

Does treating the question as if there weren’t any true direct answers to it consist of believing that there isn’t any true direct answer to the question?

It really depends on how lax we want to be with our ascriptions of belief. If behaving and cognizing as if that were so is enough to make it the case that the question-rejector believes the target proposition, then yes. For treating the question as if there weren’t any true direct answers to it is nothing but behaving and cognizing as if there weren’t any true direct answers to it. For example, when it comes to verbal behavior, one will be disposed to reply ‘There is no one answer to this question’, or something to that effect, when someone asks them the target question. But if the subject has to token a sentence in the language-of-thought, or have explicit thoughts that express a proposition in order to count as believing it, then not all cases of question-rejection will involve believing that there isn’t any true direct answer to it.

Either way, however, the main point stands. Even if rejecting the question whether p is reducible to believing that there is no true direct answer to the question, it is still a stance one can have regarding whether p, other than the stances of believing that p, disbelieving that p and being divided as to whether p.

Compare this with disbelief again: many think of the stance of disbelieving that p as the stance of believing that not-p. So disbelief is simply belief. Belief and disbelief are the same kind of attitude when abstracted away from their contents. Still, disbelieving that p is one of the possible stances that one can have regarding whether p—and here it is an alternative to the stance of believing that p. Believing that p and disbelieving that p are not the same attitude regarding whether p, even though belief and disbelief are the same kind of attitude period.

4. Isn’t Question-Rejection Just a Special Case of the Third Stance?

Many authors use the expression ‘suspend judgment’ to ascribe the third stance of the traditional taxonomy of attitudes.Footnote ⁴ And it doesn’t seem obviously incorrect to say that, when one rejects the question of whether p, one suspends judgment about whether p. So isn’t question-rejection just a special case of the third stance from the traditional taxonomy?

There is of course an admissible interpretation of ‘suspend judgment’ under which the following comes out true: when you reject the question whether p, you thereby suspend judgment about whether p, or at least you are disposed to suspend judgment about whether p.

Here we use ‘suspend judgment’ to describe someone as quite literally suspending something, namely, their judgment. To suspend judgment about whether p here is to prevent one’s judgment on whether p from taking place: one prevents oneself (for whatever reason) from judging either way, either that p or that not-p. And, when one rejects the question whether p one does prevent oneself, or one is at least disposed to prevent oneself from judging whether p. For example, upon considering the question whether Jack is bald, I prevent myself from judging either way, that is, I stop myself from either judging that Jack is bald or judging that Jack is not bald. For I think again that there is no fact of the matter as to whether Jack is bald.

That line of argument sounds perfectly reasonable. But the problem is that, when ‘they suspend judgment about whether p’ is interpreted in that literal way, that sentence does not ascribe a doxastic stance or attitude to the subject, on a par with the stances or attitudes of believing that p and disbelieving that p (see McGrath Reference McGrath2021 for more on this point). It rather describes the subject as doing something—it describes them as preventing themselves from judging (contrast to ‘they believe that p’, ‘they disbelieve that p’, ‘they are on the fence as to whether p’, ‘they think there is no fact of the matter as to whether p’).

In fact, when interpreted in that more literal way, ‘they suspend judgment about whether p’ doesn’t even carry the implication that the subject is on the fence or divided as to whether p.

A subject can suspend judgment in that sense even though they are simply avoiding the question whether p—say, because it is unpleasant for them to think about whether p—without so much as having any doxastic stance or opinion on the issue. For to suspend judgment about whether p here is just to perform some cognitive act whereby one prevents oneself from judging, and there is no specific stance regarding whether p that one needs to have in order to do that (in fact, one can even believe that p, unconsciously as one may, and suspend judgment about whether p in the present sense).

So, when interpreted literally, ‘suspend judgment’ doesn’t ascribe a doxastic stance that constitutes an alternative to belief and disbelief. But only when it is interpreted in that literal way can we say that a subject who rejects the question of whether p suspends judgment, or is at least disposed to suspend judgment, about whether p. That question-rejection entails suspension or disposition to suspend judgment does not mean that question-rejection is a special case of the third stance regarding whether p (the third stance from the traditional taxonomy). For suspension of judgment and the third stance from the traditional taxonomy are not the same thing, either.

We could still look at other idioms that philosophers use to ascribe the third stance, such as ‘suspend belief’ and ‘withhold belief’—which look better than ‘suspend judgment’, in that the latter contrasts to ‘judge’, whereas the former ones contrast to ‘believe’ (and it is usually assumed that judgment involves explicit, person-level thoughts, in contrast to belief—see Cassam Reference Cassam2010 for more on this). But similar morals apply also to these other idioms. The interpretation that allows them to correctly apply to cases of question-rejection is not the interpretation under which they ascribe a doxastic attitude of being divided between treating a proposition as if it were true and treating it as if it were false. And, as soon as we interpret them in such a way that they do ascribe such an attitude, they do not correctly apply to cases of question-rejection anymore. For again, when one rejects the question whether p, one treats p as if it were neither true nor false, rather than being divided between treating p as if it were true and treating it as if it were false.

But let us not get distracted by these partly terminological (albeit important) issues. Choice of idioms aside, we can draw a clear distinction between rejecting the question whether p and being on the fence as to whether p. And these are two different stances that one can have regarding whether p.

My stance on the question whether Alice likes porridge, for example, differs from my stance on whether Arnold Schwarzenegger likes porridge. I think that there is a fact of the matter in the latter but not in the former case. From my perspective, the fact of the matter may be that Arnold likes porridge, or that Arnold doesn’t like porridge—it could be either way. In contrast, again from my perspective, there is neither a fact that Alice likes porridge nor a fact that Alice doesn’t like porridge. My attitudes toward these two different questions are radically different, and clearly so, regardless of which idioms we use to ascribe them.

If the traditional taxonomy lumps both of those attitudes together under a single wonky category under the label ‘suspended judgment’ or ‘suspended belief’, then it gives us just one category when it should give us two.

5. Question-Rejection and Interrogative Attitudes

Is rejection an interrogative attitude? Philosophers have mentioned wondering and being curious as paradigmatic examples of interrogative attitudes (Friedman Reference Friedman2017, Carruthers Reference Carruthers2018, Willard-Kyle Reference Willard-Kyle2023).

We could say to a first approximation that an interrogative attitude is any attitude that is expressible through the utterance of an interrogative sentence—through the speech act of asking (Hawthorne Reference Hawthorne2004, Whitcomb Reference Whitcomb2017).

The stance of being on the fence or divided as to whether p is an interrogative attitude in that sense. The divided subject has a question to raise, but no answer to it. When you hold the third stance regarding whether p, you’re in doubt or uncertain as to whether p. The question whether p is the content of your very attitude. You express that attitude by asking the question—by sincerely uttering an interrogative that has that question as its content—as opposed to asserting any of its answers.Footnote ⁵

Arguably, however, not every attitude toward a question is an interrogative attitude, and rejection is a case in point. I reject the question whether Jack is bald, for I think again that there is no true answer to that question. But this attitude of mine is not an interrogative attitude. Instead of expressing my state of mind by uttering ‘Is Jack bald?’ here, I get to express it by uttering ‘There is no answer to that question’, or something along these lines.

In cases of question-rejection, it is not as if the subject thinks that there is a true answer to their question, though they cannot yet decide which one (as in case of the third stance). It is rather that they think that no such answer is to be found to begin with.

Rejecting the question whether p is one of the stances that one can have regarding whether p—much like believing that p, disbelieving that p and being on the fence regarding whether p. But, unlike the attitude of being on the fence regarding whether p, the attitude of rejecting the question whether p is not an interrogative attitude, and in that it is similar to the attitudes of believing and disbelieving that p.

There are other ways of drawing a contrast between question-rejection and interrogative attitudes, other than through the expressiveness of speech acts. Here is one such way, which I can only sketch at this point, and leave the details for a more thorough investigation. It deploys the notion of doxastic possibility. It is doxastically possible that p relative to subject S when, among the possible worlds compatible with what S believes, there is a world where p is the case (Hintikka Reference Hintikka1962, Lewis Reference Lewis1986).

For example, it is doxastically possible relative to me that there is an açaí shop in the town of Bendigo, Australia. I haven’t been there yet and I didn’t search the internet about it. Relative to everything I believe, there is a possible world where the city of Bendigo features an açaí shop. There is also a possible world compatible with everything I believe where the city of Bendigo does not feature an açaí shop. So, from my perspective, there might be an açaí shop in Bendigo, but there might also not be one. Both possibilities are open from my perspective. Accordingly, I have an interrogative attitude regarding whether there is an açaí shop in Bendigo—I am on the fence or divided as to whether there is one. I just can’t tell which one of those two possibilities is the one I’m actually in.

But now consider my take on the question of whether Jack is bald. I think there is no fact of the matter as to whether Jack is bald (and that it would be a matter of legislation whether we should classify Jack as bald or not bald, etc.). From my perspective, the world I’m actually in is neither one where Jack is bald nor one where Jack is not bald. I’m ruling out both possibilities, as opposed to not ruling out any of them.

Notice, however, that a non-classical use of negation is made in that description of my situation (the negation at play at ‘neither… nor…’ and ‘ruling out’). In particular, that Jack is neither bald nor not bald does not entail that Jack is at the same time bald and not bald (Field Reference Field2003). Furthermore, ‘it is not possible that p’ read as deploying non-classical negation does not entail ‘it is necessary that not-p’ read as deploying classical negation, so that, in describing the situation in the way I did, I do not commit myself to the claim that, from my perspective, it is necessary that Jack is not bald (see Kooi and Tamminga Reference Kooi and Tamminga2013 for more on the interaction of modalities with negation in a semantics featuring truth-value gaps).

The contrast drawn in the way just sketched can be summed up as follows. When I hold an interrogative attitude regarding whether p, from my perspective, either possibility may be the one I am actually in: the one where p is true and the one where p is false. But, when I reject the question whether p, I rule out both possibilities at the same time.

There should still be other ways of distinguishing question-rejection from interrogative attitudes in general, and from the stance of being on the fence in particular. But the points made above should suffice for now. If anything, they make it clear that there is a distinction to be made (in some way or other, even if none of the above) between two different kinds of doxastic stances regarding whether p, besides the stance of believing that p and the stance of disbelieving that p.

6. Questions and Interrogatives

Once the option of rejecting the question becomes salient, along with the three other doxastic options that traditional epistemologists present us with, we start seeing the phenomenon everywhere.

Every time a subject takes a question to rely on false presuppositions, again, they will tend to reject that question (barring perhaps cases of irrationality). And similarly with respect to cases where subjects take a fact of the matter to be missing.

We must be careful, however, not to over-ascribe the stance of question-rejection. This is particularly relevant to our ascriptions of attitudes in certain contexts of inquiry—for example, in philosophy and the natural sciences—where subjects transition more or less seamlessly from non-linguistic to linguistic considerations. They start off inquiring into what life is, for example, and end up talking about the meaning of the word ‘life’. Then at some point one of them judges the question of what life is to be a bad question, on the grounds that the word ‘life’ is ambiguous—and here it looks like they are rejecting the question of what life is.

But not every such verdict is a manifestation of question-rejection.

That you reject the question means that there is a question that you reject.

Think here of the question as the semantic contribution or content of an interrogative sentence, much like a proposition is the content of a declarative sentence.Footnote ⁶ A question can be construed, for example, as the set of its maximal complete answers, which are in turn propositions. So the question expressed by an interrogative such as ‘Is Mars bigger than Earth?’ is a set containing two propositions: the proposition that Mars is bigger than Earth and the proposition that Mars is not bigger than Earth (see Hamblin Reference Hamblin1973, Groenendijk and Stokhof Reference Groenendijk and Stokhof1984, and Ciardelli et al. Reference Ciardelli, Groenendijk and Roelofsen2019 for different ways of constructing questions as sets of answers). The question itself is that set, not that interrogative.

Now many times when we issue a ‘bad question’ verdict, what we mean to refer to is the interrogative itself, which we take to fail to express any particular question. That is, we take the interrogative to be contentless. It is not that there is a question that is bad. It is rather that there isn’t a question to begin with.

There are different reasons why an interrogative may fail to express a question, as already hinted at, for example: (a) the interrogative deploys ambiguous expressions that haven’t been disambiguated by a relevant speaker or conversational background, or (b) the interrogative deploys constructions that only have content when paired with certain elements of the context of utterance (time, speaker, place, threshold, scope of quantification, etc.), but it was uttered at a context that does not provide the relevant elements. In the case of (b), using the semantic categories from Kaplan (Reference Kaplan, Almog and Wettstein1989), we can say that the interrogative has a character—that is, a function from contexts to contents—but it doesn’t spit out a content in its context of utterance.

So we have to distinguish the stance of rejecting the question from the belief that no specific question is expressed by the utterance of an interrogative. For example, instead of saying that the logical positivists rejected metaphysical questions, it may be more accurate to say that they took certain interrogative constructions to lack content.

In the examples of rejection given in §3, we have assumed that a particular question was presented to the subject. The subject takes it that there is no fact of the matter as to whether p, but they are still faced with the question whether p. For example, I don’t think that no question is expressed by ‘Is Jack bald?’. I understand that interrogative perfectly, and I can conceive of possible worlds where one of the direct answers to that question is true (worlds where Jack is bald), as well as possible worlds where the alternative direct answer to it is true (worlds where Jack is not bald). It is just that the world I’m in is neither of those, as seen from my own perspective. There is a question, I take it, and correspondingly a particular set of direct answers—but none of those answers are true.

One can only reject a question when there is one. (Similarly, one can only believe a proposition when there is one.)

7. Are We Thereby Committed to Denying Bivalence?

It may be objected that, in countenancing the possibility of rejecting polar questions (questions expressed by ‘whether’-complements), we commit ourselves to denying the principle of bivalence, according to which every proposition is either true or false.Footnote ⁷

For example, when we grant that subject can reject the question whether Alice likes porridge, it seems that we ourselves take it that there is no fact of the matter as to whether Alice likes porridge—and so the proposition that Alice likes porridge is neither true nor false. And similarly with respect to the question whether there is going to be a third world war, say, or whether Jack is bald, as the case may be. So suddenly, as a result of including question-rejection among the possible stances that a subject can have regarding whether p, for any p, we are led to endorse controversial views in logic and philosophy of language.

But notice that one doesn’t need to agree with the subject who rejects a polar question in order to acknowledge that this is exactly what they are doing: rejecting a polar question. That this is a possible stance for the subject to adopt doesn’t entail that this is the correct stance for them to adopt (this was already hinted at in §2 above).

It may indeed happen that some readers will not be convinced by the examples of question-rejection I gave because they themselves do not reject the target questions. They will think that there is a fact of the matter in all these examples—cases involving fictional characters, future contingents, or vagueness. It is perfectly consistent for them, however, to acknowledge that other agents reject questions that they themselves don’t (and maybe even rationally so). Someone who agrees with Williamson (Reference Williamson1994), for example, thinks that it is either true or false that Jack is bald. Presumably, however, that person is also aware that there are philosophers who disagree with Williamson on this issue (e.g. Fine Reference Fine1975, Field Reference Field2003). Such philosophers think that it is neither true nor false that Jack is bald. In saying that some such philosophers reject the question whether Jack is bald, one does not thereby endorse their very position or commend their stance.

Compare this with ascriptions of the other doxastic attitudes: whereas I cannot bring myself to believe that the Earth is flat, for example, I am aware that other people believe that the Earth is flat. I think that they are wrong, but that is what they believe.

So, in order to agree with me that the traditional taxonomy of doxastic stances regarding whether p leaves out the stance of rejecting the question whether p, the reader doesn’t have to think that some propositions are neither true nor false. No commitment to the denial of the principle of bivalence ensues from their agreement.