Abstract
Suspended judgment poses a serious problem for Russellianism. In this paper I examine several possible solutions to this problem and argue that none of them is satisfactory. Then I sketch a new solution. According to this solution, suspended judgment should be understood as a sui generis propositional attitude. By this I mean that it cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, other propositional attitudes, such as belief. Since suspended judgment is sui generis in this sense, sentences that ascribe this attitude to someone should not be analyzed in terms of other attitude ascriptions, such as belief ascriptions. Instead they should be understood as involving a semantically primitive predicate, corresponding to the state of suspended judgment.
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Notes
According to this principle, the semantic content of a complex expression is determined entirely by its syntactic structure and the semantic contents of its constituent expressions.
A few remarks on notation. This notation is typically used by mathematicians to represent sets. For our purposes it’s fine to think of propositions as ordered sets, though it’s an open question whether this is just a useful way of modeling propositions or whether propositions can actually be identified with ordered sets. I myself am neutral on the matter. I should also mention that throughout this paper I represent the negation of \(<\)Superman, flies> as \(\sim \) \(<\)Superman, flies>. In general, I represent the negation of a proposition using ‘\(\sim \)’. This might strike some readers as puzzling, since it seems to involve a sentential operator being applied to a proposition rather than a sentence. I admit that it would be more formally accurate, and more in keeping with current conventions, to represent the negation of \(<\)Superman, flies> as \(<\)NEG, \(<\)Superman, flies\(>>\). But I find this way of representing negations to be cumbersome. It might also lead to confusion later in the paper. In Sect. 3, for example, I discuss Salmon’s Neg function, and it would be rather easy to confuse Neg with NEG. In any case, I hope that the reader will tolerate my decision to represent the negation of \(<\)Superman, flies> as \(\sim \) \(<\)Superman, flies>. It’s just a matter of convention, after all.
See Kaplan (1968, pp. 205–207). Note that Kaplan’s puzzle was not originally presented as a problem for Russellianism. It was presented as a problem for Quine’s (1956) account of relational belief. To my knowledge, Evans (1982, pp. 83–84) and Salmon (1986, pp. 92–98) may have been the first to discuss the problem as it relates to Russellian theories of belief (at least in print).
As Evans remarks: “We have a single proposition ... to which the subject both has and fails to have the relation corresponding to the notion of belief. Not only does this fail to give any intelligible characterization of the subject’s state of mind; it appears to be actually contradictory” (1982, p. 84).
The challenge posed by Kaplan’s puzzle, as I have formulated it, is to provide an account of Lois’s attitude toward \(<\)Superman, flies> when she both believes \(<\)Superman, flies> and suspends judgment with respect to \(<\)Superman, flies>. Crawford (2004a, b), whose views I consider in Sect. 4, would not totally agree with this formulation, but that’s for purely terminological reasons. Crawford thinks it’s obvious that “to suspend judgement with respect to something is (at least) neither to believe nor disbelieve that thing” (2004a, p. 224). So, Crawford would say that, strictly speaking, Lois does not suspend judgment with respect to \(<\)Superman, flies>, since she believes \(<\)Superman, flies>. This isn’t the way that other Russellians understand suspended judgment. As we shall see in Sect. 3, Salmon thinks suspending judgment with respect to something is consistent with believing it, and also with disbelieving it. As I said, this difference between Salmon and Crawford is purely terminological. Both Salmon and Crawford can agree that the challenge is to provide an account of Lois’s attitude toward \(<\)Superman, flies> when she both believes \(<\)Superman, flies> and seems to suspend judgment with respect to \(<\)Superman, flies> (a situation which an ordinary speaker would describe by saying ‘Lois believes that Superman flies, but she suspends judgment about whether Clark Kent flies’). For the most part, I ignore this terminological complication, unless there is reason to think that it will lead to confusion.
Equivalently, if a rational agent both believes and disbelieves p, then the agent must be grasping p under distinct guises. This, according to Salmon’s account, is true by definition. He writes the following about guises: “The important thing is that, by definition, they are such that if a fully rational believer adopts conflicting attitudes (such as belief and disbelief, or belief and suspension of judgment) toward propositions p and q, then the believer must take p and q in different ways, by means of different guises, in harboring the conflicting attitudes toward them—even if p and q are in fact the same proposition” (1989, p. 246).
I’m assuming here that \(\sim \) \(<\)Superman, flies> has the negation function as a constituent. But it might be thought that \(\sim \) \(<\)Superman, flies> has falsity as a constituent, which is a property rather than a function. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which of these views is correct. My basic point applies to both views. For suppose that \(\sim \) \(<\)Superman, flies> has falsity as a constituent. An agent would need to grasp this property in order to grasp \(\sim \) \(<\)Superman, flies>. But this isn’t required in order to grasp \(<\)Superman, flies>.
Although some have interpreted Salmon as arguing that ‘believes’ expresses a ternary relation, he has always regarded ‘believes’ as expressing a binary relation between agents and propositions. Still, this binary relation is understood in terms of a ternary relation: A stands in the belief relation to p just in case there is a guise such that A stands in BEL to p and that guise. It’s worth noting that Salmon (1995, p. 7) has suggested that the belief relation can be defined in terms of the ‘\(\lambda \)’-operator: [\(\lambda x, p]\) [\(\exists g[x\hbox { grasps }p\) under g & \(\hbox {BEL}(x, p, g)\)]]. This, however, doesn’t change the fact that Salmon analyzes ordinary belief ascriptions (\(^{\lceil }A\) believes \(p^{\rceil })\) as existential generalizations over guises (\(^{\lceil }\exists g[A\hbox { grasps }p\) under g & \(\hbox {BEL}(A, p, g)]^{\rceil })\). It’s this view that I question. As far as I can tell, the fact that Salmon’s notion of belief is binary and definable using the ‘\(\lambda \)’-operator doesn’t undermine any of my criticisms. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for prompting me to discuss this point.
This point is owed to David Braun (1998, pp. 567–568).
See Salmon (1989, pp. 245–246) for some characterizations of the BEL relation.
Salmon doesn’t say much about the nature of guises, except that guises shouldn’t be identified with sentences. See Salmon (1993, pp. 87–88). I suggested in Atkins (2013a) and Atkins (2013b) that guises are best understood as pieces of descriptive information, similar in some respects to Fregean modes of presentation.
Again I’m assuming that \(\sim <\!\hbox {Superman, flies}\!>\) has the negation function as a constituent, rather than the property falsity. But again it doesn’t matter which view is correct. For, presumably, there are many ways of grasping this property, just as there are many ways of grasping a given proposition. See n. 7.
I want to repeat a point that I made above. Although I have presented problems for Salmon’s account, I don’t claim to have decisively refuted it. There is certainly more to be said about these matters. Indeed, Salmon has already suggested a solution to the problems surrounding the Neg function.
To my knowledge, his suggestion has never been made in print, but it was made during personal correspondence. His suggestion is that, although there are many ways of grasping the negation function, one of these ways is privileged. So, for any guise x which is a way of grasping \(<\!\hbox {Superman, flies}\!>\), the Neg function yields a guise which is the same as x except that it includes this privileged way of grasping the negation function.
But how are we to understand this privileged way of grasping the negation function? Salmon has suggested an answer to this question as well. According to Salmon, the privileged way of grasping the negation function is associated with ‘\(\sim \)’, which identifies the negation function. An expression identifies its designatum just in case it presents its designatum in a way that reveals who or what it is. Interestingly, this idea was inspired by Alonzo Church. It was suggested by Church, who was a staunch Fregean, that ‘that’-clauses not only designate propositions, they also present those propositions in a privileged mode. (For further discussion, see Salmon (2001, pp. 587–588, including n. 36).) Adapting this idea, we can say that a way of grasping is identifying just in case it reveals who or what is being grasped. So, the privileged way of grasping the negation function is privileged in that it identifies the negation function. (The notion of an identifying guise is discussed further in Atkins (2013a).)
I respect this attempt at solving the problem, but I still have worries about Salmon’s account. Suspending judgment is an ordinary psychological attitude. It was bad enough when, in order to represent this attitude, we had to invoke the special notion of withholding belief. It seems, now, that we must invoke the special notion of identifying guises. An alternative solution to Kaplan’s puzzle would surely be desirable.
Strictly speaking, it’s Crawford’s view that Lois’s apparent state of suspended judgment can be captured by the combination of (18) and (19). As I mentioned in n. 5 above, Crawford assumes that suspending judgment with respect to something is inconsistent with believing it. So, it may seem to Lois that she suspends judgment, but she’s technically mistaken. As I explained in n. 5, this is merely a matter of terminology.
In Crimmins’s (1992) original story, someone is driven to the conclusion that he believes p even though he also disbelieves p (‘I believe p’, the person might say, ‘even though p is false!’). In my case, someone is driven to the conclusion that she believes p even though she also suspends judgment with respect to p (‘I believe p’, she might say, ‘even though I’m not sure whether p is true!’). The two cases are meant to be analogous.
As I explained in n. 5, it’s Crawford’s view that belief is inconsistent with suspended judgment. So, Crawford might insist that Lois doesn’t suspend judgment about whether Jimmy is an idiot, since Lois believes that Jimmy is an idiot. But, as I explained in n. 5, this is a purely terminological issue, and so it doesn’t really undermine my counterexample. The fact of the matter is that Lois bears a certain psychological attitude toward the proposition that Jimmy is an idiot (an attitude which an ordinary speaker would describe by saying ‘Lois suspends judgment about whether Jimmy is an idiot’). The question is whether Russellians can adequately represent this psychological attitude. It’s Crawford’s view that this attitude can be represented along the lines of (18) and (19). But, as I’ve argued, this seems to be incorrect, since Lois fails to believe that she doesn’t believe that Jimmy is an idiot.
That being said, we can easily set up the counterexample so that Lois doesn’t believe that Jimmy is an idiot. Consider the following variation on our story: After Lois says that she suspends judgment about whether Jimmy is an idiot, Jimmy responds ‘You know me under two guises. Under my other guise, you think that I’m an idiot’. Then Lois says ‘Well, it seems that I do believe that you’re an idiot! Under your present guise, however, I’m still not sure about you’. The twist in this story is that Jimmy is lying. Lois doesn’t believe that Jimmy is an idiot (there is no guise under which she accepts that proposition). In all other respects this story is the same as our original story. So, Lois suspends judgment about whether Jimmy is an idiot (even according to Crawford’s terminology). And yet Lois fails to believe that she doesn’t believe that Jimmy is an idiot (in this respect there is no difference between this story and our original story). Again we have a counterexample to Crawford’s account.
It should be mentioned that this variation on our story is independently interesting. Lois comes to believe that she believes that Jimmy is an idiot, even though she doesn’t believe that Jimmy is an idiot. It’s common for theorists, especially Russellians, to deny the general principle that if one believes that one doesn’t believe p then one doesn’t believe p. But it’s less common for Russellians to deny the principle that if one believes that one believes p then one believes p. In fact, Crawford says that Russellians have “no reason to dispute this principle, which is a good thing, since it does seem to be virtually unassailable” (2004b, p. 193). But Crawford is mistaken. The above case suggests that it’s possible to believe that one believes p without actually believing p. Russellians have strong reason to reject the latter principle.
But Russellians are not the only ones. Notice that the description of the above case does not presuppose the truth of Russellianism. It’s enough that Lois believes that Russellianism is true. For it’s her faith in Russellianism that leads her to conclude that she believes that Jimmy is an idiot. It seems, then, that pretty much everyone should admit that Lois believes that she believes that Jimmy is an idiot, for the above case does not involve anything more controversial than the existence of Russellians.
The history behind this paper is complicated. It was published in 2013 in The American Philosophical Association Centennial Series. But it’s based on Kaplan’s 1981 Presidential Address, entitled “De Re Belief,” delivered at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Kaplan delivered another Presidential Address in 2003, also entitled “De Re Belief.” The 2003 manuscript remains unpublished, but it’s discussed in Eaker (2004), and has been widely circulated. The 2013 paper and the unpublished 2003 manuscript provide the same basic solution to the problem of suspended judgment. But there are interesting differences between them. Kaplan gives certain examples in his 2003 manuscript that don’t appear in his published paper. I mention one of these examples in the following section. That being the case, I’ve included two separate entries in my bibliography (one corresponding to the 2013 paper and the other corresponding to the 2003 manuscript).
This case was introduced by Saul Kripke (1979), of course, who argued that it presents a problem for standard theories of belief ascription. Part of the problem, according to Kripke, is that Pierre seems to be rational. Yet it seems that we must ascribe contradictory beliefs to Pierre. We need only apply P1 and P2. Russellians are likely to treat Pierre’s situation as a special case of a more general problem. Russellians generally agree that it’s possible for a rational agent to hold contradictory beliefs. Lois, for example, believes and disbelieves the proposition that Superman flies. Analogously, Russellians would say that Pierre believes and disbelieves the proposition that London is pretty. This might present a problem, but, from a Russellian point of view, it doesn’t present a new problem. See Salmon (2011) for a thorough discussion of the Pierre case from a Russellian perspective.
Kaplan puts the point by saying that if an agent demurs on S, then the agent nonbelieves the proposition expressed by S. Unless I am very mistaken, ‘demur’ is usually taken to mean the same thing as ‘reject’ or ‘oppose’. But it’s clear from Kaplan’s discussion that, when he says ‘demurs on’, he means the same thing as ‘refuses to accept’, or ‘refrains from accepting’, or what have you.
As an anonymous reviewer has suggested to me, it’s possible to swap P3 for a stronger principle, which says that if an agent refuses to accept a sentence and also refuses to reject it, then the agent nonbelieves the proposition expressed by the sentence. In point of fact, this is essentially the principle that I suggest in the following section, except that the unfamiliar notion of nonbelief is replaced with the notion of suspended judgment.
This idea is not entirely new. Friedman (2013), whom I mentioned in Sect. 1, argues that suspended judgment is an interrogative attitude, and that interrogative attitudes are not reducible to propositional attitudes. But she doesn’t try to connect this idea with Russellianism. For the record, Friedman suggested in an early paper (2012, p. 167 and pp. 180–181) that suspended judgment is a sui generis attitude, but she didn’t try to defend her suggestion. Her main purpose in that paper was to defend the claim that suspending judgment is, or at least involves, a “genuine attitude.” She left open the possibility that this “genuine attitude” is reducible to higher order attitudes.
A paradigm example of a propositional attitude that is not sui generis is disbelief. This is because disbelief is straightforwardly reducible to belief. To disbelieve a proposition is just to believe the negation of the proposition.
See Eaker (2009, p. 226). Eaker argues, plausibly in my opinion, that belief ascriptions do not reflect all the facts about belief. In fact, Eaker suggests that a belief ascription can be true even if the agent designated by the subject term fails to believe the proposition designated by the ‘that’-clause. This extreme view has been defended by others, including Wettstein (1986), Bach (1997), and Buchanan (2012). I myself do not subscribe to this extreme view. Even if belief ascriptions do not reflect all the facts about belief, they surely reflect some of the facts about belief. But the issues here are difficult, and a full discussion is beyond the scope of this paper.
Though Crawford’s version of Russellianism is an odd exception. See n. 5.
It’s possible to identify the semantic content of (1) with the “gappy” propositional template. It doesn’t seem to matter to Soames, so long as it’s allowed that the proposition expressed by (1) is capable of being “enriched” by descriptive information in various contexts. See specifically Soames (2005, p. 362, n. 10).
Even if guises are correctly identified with descriptive information, as I suggested in Atkins (2013a) and Atkins (2013b), there is no reason to insist that guises figure in the semantics of belief ascriptions, as opposed to the pragmatics of belief ascriptions, and there is certainly no reason to insist that belief ascription must be analyzed as generalizations over guises.
It might be observed that my account of suspended judgment is technically consistent with Fregeanism. Still, I think that it can be fairly described as a Russellian account, since it’s been formulated in response to Kaplan’s puzzle, which is a puzzle mainly for Russellians. (Prima facie, suspended judgment doesn’t pose a problem for Fregeanism. See my brief discussion of Fregeanism in Sect. 2.) That being said, Fregeans should feel free to adopt my account if they so choose.
I am indebted to Matt Griffin, Luke Manning, and two anonymous reviewers for extensive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am especially indebted to Nathan Salmon for comments on an ancestor of this paper, and more generally for his friendship and guidance when I studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Atkins, P. A Russellian account of suspended judgment. Synthese 194, 3021–3046 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1089-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1089-x