Credences and suspended judgments as transitional attitudes

Staffel, Julia

doi:10.1111/phis.12154

Cited by 23 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…This commitment has the subject bound to holding back any potentially premature judgment with respect to p for the sake of an impartial and critical assessment of the evidence. This fits well with the description of suspension involving an ''interrogative attitude'', as has been proposed by Friedman (2017), Lord and Sylvan (2020;forthcoming) and also Staffel (2019). The attitudes they suggest come with a commitment to becoming or remaining (at least temporarily) undecided to support and guide a subject's inquiry into some matter.…”

Section: Committing To Indecisionsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…In such cases, S's indecision is the object of her commitment, not its aim. By taking a stance toward her own doxastic state regarding p, S (at least temporarily) terminates or suspends further inquiry into the question whether p. It is fair to say that suspension in the form of an ''anti-interrogative attitude'' (Lord, 2020) or a ''terminal attitude'' (Staffel, 2019) is perfectly compatible with my proposed commitment to indecision as in A2 (even though the quoted authors follow a different agenda than is suggested here).…”

Section: Committing To Indecisionmentioning

confidence: 68%

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Agnosticism as settled indecision

Wagner¹

2021

Philos Stud

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In this paper, I spell out a descriptive account of agnosticism that captures the intuitive view that a subject enters the mental state of agnosticism via an act or event called suspension. I will argue that agnosticism is a complex mental state, and that the formation of an attitude is the relevant act or event by which a subject commits to indecision regarding some matter. I will suggest a ‘two-component analysis’ that addresses two aspects that jointly account for the settled state of agnosticism: (1) the subject’s de facto indecision and (2) the subject’s commitment to her indecision. Unlike meta-cognitivist or sui generis accounts, I do not take the agnostic’s commitment to indecision as constitutive for her indecision but rather as an evaluation or qualification of the indecision that she already exhibits. Agnosticism, thus, is a settled form of indecision that marks the end of inquiry.

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Section: Committing To Indecisionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Committing To Indecisionmentioning

confidence: 68%

Agnosticism as settled indecision

Wagner¹

2021

Philos Stud

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“…Readers who agree with this view should modify the examples accordingly by adjusting the credence that constitutes the rational conclusion. 6 I explain in more detail why we should distinguish between transitional and terminal attitudes and what roles they can play in Staffel (2019b). Regarding my general notion of credences, it doesn't matter for the debate in this paper how we think of them -as graded attitudes towards suitable contents, or as on-off beliefs with probabilistic contents, or in some other way -as long as we take them to be attitudes that encode uncertainty.…”

Section: E N D N O T E Smentioning

confidence: 98%

Pro tem rationality

Staffel

2021

Philosophical Perspectives

Self Cite

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Epistemologists routinely distinguish between two kinds of justification or rationality -the propositional and the doxastic kind -in order to characterize importantly different ways in which an attitude can be justified or rational for a person. I argue that these notions, as they are commonly understood, are well suited to capture rationality judgments about the attitudes that agents reach as conclusions of their reasoning. Yet, these notions are ill-suited to capture rationality judgments about attitudes that agents form while their reasoning is still in progress. In fact, we currently lack any suitable theory of rationality that lets us capture the ways in which we evaluate the rationality of such transitional attitudes, even though they are ubiquitous. I propose to capture these rationality judgments by introducing a new notion of rationality that is orthogonal to the propositional/doxastic distinction, which I call pro tem rationality. This new notion can be integrated with both traditional and formal ways of characterizing rationality or justification. It can be used to enlighten debates about logical and empirical learning, higher-order evidence, and the epistemology of philosophy, among others.

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“…12 There is an interesting discussion about different kinds of suspension some of which are inquiry-closing attitudes whereas others are inquiry-starting. See, for example, Staffel (2019). In Wagner (forthcoming), I explain why only inquiry-ending suspension can lead to the settled state of agnosticism.…”

Section: Dealing With Epistemic Conflictmentioning

confidence: 99%

Epistemic Dilemma and Epistemic Conflict

Wagner¹

2021

Epistemic Dilemmas

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Credences and suspended judgments as transitional attitudes

Cited by 23 publications

References 15 publications

Agnosticism as settled indecision

Agnosticism as settled indecision

Pro tem rationality

Epistemic Dilemma and Epistemic Conflict

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