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The questioning-attitude account of agnosticism

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Abstract

I defend a proposition-directed, sui generis account of agnosticism, according to which being agnostic about some proposition, P, involves a sceptical or questioning mental stance towards both the truth and falsity of P. Call this the questioning-attitude account. The questioning-attitude account contrasts with the question-directed attitude account of Jane Friedman, which holds that the object of agnosticism is a question rather than a proposition. I argue that the questioning-attitude account not only avoids a major weakness of Friedman’s question-directed attitude account, but it also displays the following three attractive features: (1) it offers an explanation of why ascriptions of agnosticism often take an interrogative compliment, (2) it offers a univocal account of the content of all three doxastic attitudes, and (3) it fleshes out the claim that agnosticism is sui generis by describing what makes agnosticism distinct from both belief and disbelief.

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Notes

  1. Friedman (2013c, 2017) prefers to use the term “suspend judgement” to refer to the neutral doxastic attitude. However, following Matthew McGrath (McGrath, 2021), I will use the term “agnosticism” to refer to the attitude and “suspend judgement” to refer to the mental act of putting off judgement. While there are important differences between my conception of the neutral doxastic attitude and Friedman’s, nothing of substance will depend on this difference of terminology.

  2. Shah and Velleman (2005, p. 503). See and cf. Cassam (2010, p. 81).

  3. See and cf. Lord (2020, p. 128).

  4. The normative account of what it means to be committed to the truth of P offered here includes a narrow scope requirement having to do with the appropriate doxastic response to one's evidence and a wide scope requirement stipulating that one is rationally criticisable if one adopts a commitment to not-P while also maintaining one’s commitment to P.   Lord (2018) argues, I believe convincingly, that wide scope consistency requirements are reducible to narrow scope evidential norms. However, I wish to remain non-committal regarding such reducibility for the purposes of the present discussion.

  5. Examples of the narrow usage of the term “doxastic attitude” include: Feldman and Conee (2018), Steup (1988), Chisholm (1989), Sosa (1991), Feldman (2003), Steup (2008), and McGrath (McGrath, 2021). For an argument that the attitudes of believing, disbelieving, and agnosticism (or what she calls “suspending judgement”) are not reducible to degrees of belief, see Friedman (2013c).

  6. Friedman (2013a, p. 145).

  7. Special thanks to an anonymous referee for this journal for raising the present objection.

  8. For an in-depth discussion of the relationship between agnosticism and inquiry, see Archer (2018, 2019).

  9. Lilly (2019, pp. 217–218).

  10. See and cf. Friedman (2013b: 178) and Raleigh (2021).

  11. Raleigh (2021, p. 2462).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

    Avery Archer

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Archer, A. The questioning-attitude account of agnosticism. Synthese 200, 498 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03971-w

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