Suspending Judgement about Rationality

Thomas Raleigh (University of Luxembourgh)

10 May 2024, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão [C201.J] (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Can it ever be rational to suspend judgement about the rationality of one of your own doxastic attitudes? There has been much recent discussion of the following kinds of straightforwardly akratic combinations of attitudes: believing p & believing I am not justified in believing that p, or, believing p & believing that I ought not believe that p. Some theorists have argued that such combinations are always necessarily irrational. Others have argued that they need not always be irrational. In this talk I focus on a different kind of combination of attitudes: believing that p and suspending judgement whether I am justified in believing that p, or, believing that p and suspending judgement whether I am permitted to believe that p. Huemer (2010), Smithies (2019) and Tal (2022) have all argued that these latter combinations must also always be irrational. I show what is wrong with these arguments and show how there can be cases where such combinations are indeed rational.