Lecture 3: The Problem of Suspension

Matthew McGrath (Washington University in St. Louis)

•Date: 12/07

•Time: 14:30-16:30

•Abstract: This lecture continues the examination of evidence-uncritical claims about people should or shouldn’t believe. It’s highly plausible that if you epistemically should believe a proposition p, then it’s false that you epistemically should suspend judgment on whether p. This link between norms for belief and norms for suspension would be easily accommodated if suspension were the mere absence of belief or if it were a state of having an intermediary credence. However, I argue that such views of suspension are independently implausible. The best views of suspension take it to be an agential phenomenon, consisting in postponing or at least refraining from judgment. But it is unclear how an agential phenomenon could come under epistemic norms at all. I explore two possible solutions to this problem, which I call the “problem of suspension.”