Suspension, Equipollence, and Inquiry: A Reply to Wieland

Abstract

It is generally thought that suspension of judgment about a proposition p is the doxastic attitude one is rationally compelled to adopt whenever the epistemic reasons for and against p are equipollent or equally credible, that is, whenever the total body of available evidence bearing on p epistemically justifies neither belief nor disbelief in p. However, in a recent contribution to this journal, Jan Wieland proposes "to broaden the conditions for suspension, and argue that it is rational to suspend belief on a certain issue even if one´s current evidence is not neutral (or even close to neutral)". My aim in this paper is to point to a number of problems in Wieland´s position, some of which in connection with the account of Pyrrhonian skepticism found in the extant works of Sextus Empiricus.