Abstract
Recently, Jane Friedman has argued that what we call “suspension of judgment” is an interrogative attitude: If one suspends one’s judgment about the question Q, one is inquiring into Q. Many philosophers have criticised or developed Friedman’s idea by offering their own takes on suspended judgment. However, despite the differences we can find in the various accounts recently presented in the literature, there is a widespread idea in our theories of suspended judgment: What we call “suspension of judgment” implies a state of doxastic neutrality and is a condition that is doxastically incoherent and metaphysically or normatively incompatible with belief. In this paper, I propose a new conception of suspended judgment that is not committed to the previous widespread perspective. Following Cohen’s theory of acceptance, I will present a non-doxastic type of suspended judgment described as suspension of acceptance. Considering this new conception, I will first underline how this non-doxastic way of suspending our judgment can be regarded as an interrogative mental act. Then, against the widespread perspective, I will show that something we call “suspension of judgment” is a non-doxastic mental act that does not imply a state of doxastic neutrality and can doxastically cohere and be metaphysically and normatively compatible with belief.