Suspension and Scepticism
Recent debates in epistemology have assumed a positive conception of suspension of judgement, according to which suspending requires the presence of a distinctive mental state, either a sui generis indecision-representing attitude or a higher-order belief about one’s doxastic situation. The paper challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that sceptical traditions, in particular Pyrrhonian and Cartesian scepticism, operate with a privative conception of suspension: scepticism does not suggest adopting a positive mental attitude but simply to refrain from both belief and disbelief (given suitable cognitive preconditions). We show that the Pyrrhonian strategy of equipollence and Descartes’ method of doubt do not aim for suspension positively conceived. We tentatively suggest that privative suspension is thus of primary significance for epistemology.
