Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Friedman on suspended judgment

  • Published:
Synthese Aims and scope Submit manuscript

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. For treatments of Kaplan’s Puzzle see Kaplan (1968, 2013), Salmon (1986, 1989), Crawford (2004), Tillman (2005) and Atkins (2017). For recent treatments of the peer disagreement problem, see Christensen (2009), Kornblith (2010), Christensen (2011) and King (2012).

  2. See, e.g., Friedman (2013b, p. 165).

  3. For a comprehensive defence of this claim, see Chapter 2 of McGlynn (2014).

  4. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.

  5. This is a surprising omission since Friedman references Crawford’s paper in other places (2013a, b).

  6. Tillman (2005) considers a similar case of Massively Unreflective Ralph.

  7. Williams’s treatment of this problem is of course much more comprehensive. For some influential critiques of his position see: Winters (1979), Scott-Kakures (1994) and Johnston (1995).

  8. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.

  9. A similar argument is advanced by Tillman (2005) against Crawford’s (2004) account of suspended judgment as involving a higher-order propositional attitude.

  10. See Friedman et al. (2003) and Sung et al. (2007).

  11. Unfortunately, it is difficult to study directly subject’s abilities to represent their own mental states. For one attempt, see Gopnik and Astington (1988).

  12. Thanks to Sam Clarke for guiding me through the recent findings in this area.

  13. However, as Friedman herself repeatedly acknowledges, the force of syntactic considerations is limited: “While I don’t think that considerations of syntax alone could push us to this shift in our thinking about the contents of our ‘suspendings’, they certainly should be taken seriously” (2017, p. 304).

  14. Archer (2018, p. 5) makes a similar observation.

  15. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.

  16. See e.g., (2017, p. 309): “I will focus the discussion largely on wondering and curiosity, as well as, of course, inquiry and suspension, taking them as representative of the class [of IAs] as a whole”.

  17. This is not the only consideration offered by Friedman (2017) in support of claims (2) and (4). However, as Friedman acknowledges, the force of these other considerations is limited. For instance, she makes a point about historical treatments of suspended judgment: “there is a sense in which the view tracks the treatment of suspended judgment through the history of philosophy in that it is plausibly closely aligned with the Cartesian and the Pyrrhonian accounts of that state” (p. 316). She also makes a point based on linguistic considerations “Suspending judgment then seems to imply putting off or delaying making that judgment. And this seems to imply that one is intending or aiming to judge … But someone ‘aiming to judge’ is plausibly someone who is in the sort of inquiring frame of mind at issue here” (p. 317).

  18. Friedman acknowledges that. See (2013b, p. 147) and (2017, p. 304).

References

  • Archer, A. (2018). Wondering about what you know. Analysis, 78(4), 596–604.

    Google Scholar 

  • Atkins, P. (2017). A Russellian account of suspended judgment. Synthese, 194(8), 3021–3046.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bergmann, M. (2005). Defeaters and higher-level requirements. The Philosophical Quarterly, 55(220), 419–436.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bugnyar, T. (2011). Knower–guesser differentiation in ravens: Others’ viewpoints matter. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278(1705), 634–640.

    Google Scholar 

  • Christensen, D. (2009). Disagreement as evidence: The epistemology of controversy. Philosophy Compass, 4(5), 756–767.

    Google Scholar 

  • Christensen, D. (2011). Disagreement, question-begging, and epistemic self-criticism. Philosopher’s Imprint, 11(6), 1–6.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crawford, S. (2004). A solution for Russellians to a puzzle about belief. Analysis, 64(3), 223–229.

    Google Scholar 

  • Feldman, R. (2000). The ethics of belief. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60(3), 667–695.

    Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, J. (2013a). Suspended judgment. Philosophical Studies, 162(2), 165–181.

    Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, J. (2013b). Question-directed attitudes. Philosophical Perspectives, 27(1), 145–174.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, J. (2017). Why suspend judging? Nous, 51(2), 302–326.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Friedman, J. (forthcoming). Inquiry and belief. Nous. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12222.

  • Friedman, B., Kahn Jr., P. H., & Hagman, J. (2003). Hardware companions? What online AIBO discussion forums reveal about the human–robotic relationship. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM Press.

  • Gopnik, A., & Astington, J. (1988). Children’s understanding of representational change and its relation to understanding of false belief and the appearance-reality distinction. Child Development, 59(1), 26–37.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Johnston, M. (1995). Self-deception and the nature of mind. In C. MacDonald & G. MacDonald (Eds.), Philosophy of psychology. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kaplan, D. (1968). Quantifying in. Synthese, 19(1), 178–214.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kaplan, D. (2013). De re belief. The American Philosophical Association Centennial Series, 9, 25–37.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • King, N. (2012). Disagreement: What’s the problem? Or a good peer is hard to find. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 85(2), 249–272.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kornblith, H. (2010). Belief in the face of controversy. In R. Feldman & T. A. Warfield (Eds.), Disagreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kovacs, A. M., Teglas, E., & Endress, A. D. (2010). The social sense: Susceptibility to others’ beliefs in human infants and adults. Science, 330(6012), 1830–1834.

    Google Scholar 

  • Krupenye, C., Kano, F., Hirata, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2016). Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs. Science, 354(6308), 110–114.

    Google Scholar 

  • McGlynn, A. (2014). Knowledge first?. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moon, A. (2018). The nature of doubt and a new puzzle about belief, doubt, and confidence. Synthese, 195(4), 1827–1848.

    Google Scholar 

  • Onishi, K. H., & Baillargeon, R. (2005). Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs? Science, 308(5719), 255–258.

    Google Scholar 

  • Russell, B. (1997). What is an agnostic? In J. Slater (Ed.), Bertrand Russell: His Works,volume 11: Last philosophical testament (pp. 1943–1968). London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Salmon, N. (1986). Frege’s puzzle. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Salmon, N. (1989). Illogical belief. Philosophical Perspectives, 3, 243–285.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott-Kakures, D. (1994). On belief and captivity of the will. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 54, 77–103.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sturgeon, S. (2010). Confidence and coarse-grained attitudes. In T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Oxford studies in epistemology (Vol. 3). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sung, J., Guo, L., Grinter, R., & Christensen, H. (2007). “My Roomba is my Rambo”: Intimate home appliances. In Proceedings of UbiComp 2007.

  • Tillman, C. (2005). A Millian propositional guise for one puzzling English gal. Analysis, 65(3), 251–258.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wedgwood, R. (2002). The aim of belief. Philosophical Perspectives, 16, 267–297.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-of-mind development: The truth about false belief. Child Development, 72(3), 655–684.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Whitcomb, D. (2010). Curiosity was framed. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(3), 664–687.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Williams, B. (1970). Deciding to believe. In Howard E. Kiefer & Milton K. Munitz (Eds.), Language, belief, and metaphysics. Albany: SUNY Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Winters, B. (1979). Believing at will. Journal of Philosophy, 76, 243–256.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Tim Williamson, Aleksander Domoslawski, Sam Clarke, Weng Kin San, and two anonymous referees for very helpful written comments and discussions.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Philosophy Department, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA

    Michal Masny

Authors
  1. Michal Masny
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michal Masny.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The author declares that he has no conflict of interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Masny, M. Friedman on suspended judgment. Synthese 197, 5009–5026 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01957-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01957-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation