Does suspending judgment require judgment?

Question

In Reasonable Religious Disagreements , Feldman argues that much of the time when there is widespread disagreement over some issue, the rational approach is to suspend judgment. I have a question about this view. It seems that whether or not to suspend judgment on a given issue is itself a judgment! And in many cases, this will be a rather contentious judgment indeed; some people might vehemently disagree with your suspension of judgment.

So my thought is, we simply cannot avoid making a judgment on contentious issues, because avoidance would itself be a judgment on a (different) contentious issue. To put it another way, every time we are confronted with an issue, we have to judge whether this issue is something with a clear answer or something we must suspend judgment on. But that itself is a judgment. How could someone respond to this?

Edit: apparently, I didn't spell out the issue clearly enough. I made a new post which is hopefully more clear.

Answer 1

Feldman basically says that im situations of high epistemic uncertainty, it is often better to stay agnostic .

In order to do so, we need to judge that the matter at hand features so much epistemic uncertainty that we cannot judge whether it is true or false. Hence, it is a meta- judgement to suspend judgement regarding this particular question, nothing more, nothing less.

While you are correct that in a way, this means that this meta-judgement needs to have more epistemic certainty or would have to be suspended itself, this is no inherent problem:

It may both be possible to say that at least it is certain that it is uncertain what really is the case, and that we just add another layer and say that the particular matter and its epistemic certainty are uncertain, yet at least that is sufficiently certain.

Answer 2

You are right that a decision to suspend judgement is a judgement. However, the point you are missing is that it is a different judgement. You seem to think the phrase 'suspend judgement' means 'make no judgements whatsoever'- it does not. The phrase means to keep an open mind.

Answer 3

1. You are right that a decision to suspend judgment about an issue X is a judgment.
2. Unlike what some others have said, it is a judgment about X, because it is tied inextricably to your degree of belief in X. It represents a degree of belief higher than the level where you would say, "I disbelieve X," but lower than the level where you would say, "I believe X."

Uncertainty in a proposition is a judgment, not a meta-judgment; normally, all our judgments about any proposition involve some uncertainty. Uncertainty is normal and expected on the object-level, not the meta-level.

You are right that we cannot avoid making a judgment on contentious issues. If you remember and understand a claim, then your brain automatically is going to assign some level of credence to it. Even if that level of credence is "I don't have enough information to be sure. " Brains just do that - it's like "don't think of an elephant. " The only way your brain would avoid assigning any credence at all is if you have never heard the claim, have completely forgotten about it, or don't even have a dim idea of what it means.

Answer 4

It depends on how you view the notion of a judgement. The judgement over a proposition generally sub-divides into positing that p, or positing that ~p, and the choice to suspend judgement on the matter is simply to not posit p or ~p, but you are still making a judgement over the very notion of a making a judgement over p or ~p (that is, assume that "making a judgement" is "j", which also means positing p or ~p. Not making a judgement is refraining from positing p or ~p, that is, it is ~j. Every omission from a primary judgement is a judgement over the judgement which encompasses the omission itself and its opposite, which is the primary judgement). Basically, you will always exercise judgement, but that doesnt mean you cant suspend judgement on a given matter.