Suspension of judgment or belief is often described as the neutral doxastic position or stance, alongside belief and disbelief. However, in this contribution, I will demonstrate that there is more than one way of being neutral. I will introduce paradigmatic cases involving cognitive neutrality and highlight significant differences in their nature, such as their relation to inquiry. I will argue that judgment suspension is an act of committing to indecision, leading to a qualified neutral state of mind. However, subjects can (...) commit to indecision in different ways: depending on their epistemic situation and goals, they can suspend agnostically, precautionarily, or hypothetically. These three resulting states of committed indecision must be distinguished from uncommitted indecision, which is the basic state of doxastic neutrality. (shrink)

The paper addresses the nature of seemings in light of their role in inquiry. Seemings are mental states or events with propositional content that have a specific phenomenology often referred to as “felt truth”. In epistemology, seemings are mainly discussed as possible (non-inferential) justifications for belief. Yet, epistemology has recently taken a zetetic turn, that is, a turn toward the study of inquiry. I will argue that the role of seemings in epistemology should be re-assessed from the perspective of inquiry (...) and deliberation. Seemings may fall short of justifying beliefs, but there is an important role for seemings in the zetetic realm, which may also explain why seemings lack direct justificatory force for beliefs. Seemings, so I will suggest, can provide normative reasons for performing certain zetetic tasks, but they cannot provide normative reasons for making up one’s mind about the inquired question. In this sense, the zetetic role of seemings can be described as guiding rational inquiry. I will suggest that a modified version of the so-called Taking Evidence View about the nature of seemings is best fitted to accommodate their zetetic role. Yet, contra existing versions of the Taking Evidence View, my modified account acknowledges that seemings are genuine experiences (of one’s evidential standing during inquiry) that are accompanied by the characteristic phenomenology of what is called a “feeling of truth”. By doing so, my modified version of the Taking Evidence View incorporates the (as I take it) most important feature of the rival Experience View of seemings. (shrink)

In this chapter, I assess a new challenge for Evidentialism as proposed by Earl Conee and Richard Feldman. This challenge arises from the “zetetic turn” in epistemology that marks a shift from the assessment of doxastic attitudes to the study of inquiry and the process of making up one’s mind. Can the core Evidentialist principles, EJ and WF, be defended against Jane Friedman’s suggestion that rational inquirers often have to fail standard epistemic norms? I argue that Evidentialism can be defended (...) but its claims about epistemic obligation need revising. I will argue that epistemic justification is not equivalent to epistemic obligation and that a subject’s epistemic obligation to be in a doxastic state that fits their evidence depends on being motivated or obliged to figure out the corresponding question. I will show that there is no problem for evidentialism in supporting these claims: (1) having evidence alone is insufficient to generate an epistemic obligation to have the fitting doxastic attitude, and (2) epistemic justification is solely a matter of the evidence possessed. (shrink)

In this paper, I will examine the notion of an epistemic dilemma, its characterizations in the literature, and the different intuitions prompted by it. I will illustrate that the notion of an epistemic dilemma is expected to capture various phenomena that are not easily unified with one concept: while some aspects of these phenomena are more about the agent in a certain situation, other aspects seem to be more about the situation as such. As a consequence, incompatible intuitions emerge concerning (...) the transparency of epistemic dilemmas as well as regarding the role that doxastic suspension plays in resolving cases of epistemic dilemma. I suggest to distinguish between the mental state of agents who find themselves in an epistemic dilemma and the normative situation that gives rise to a dilemma. I will refer to the agent’s mental state as epistemic conflict and will reserve the term epistemic dilemma for evidential situations in which epistemic principles either recommend incompatible doxastic responses or render all options impermissible. The concept of epistemic conflict not only captures the mental state of agents who find themselves in a genuine epistemic dilemma but also applies to agents who face difficult epistemic choices that they cannot resolve without substantial cognitive (and often pragmatic) effort, for example, via doxastic suspension. (shrink)