When you don’t have enough evidence to believe or disbelieve, is agnosticism a rational attitude in its own right or just a temporary pause on the way to a verdict?
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1. Guest
Avery Archer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at George Washington University in Washington, DC. His work has focused on the philosophy of action, philosophy of mind and intentionality, moral psychology and metaethics, epistemology, and more.
2. Book Summary
In The Attitude of Agnosticism, Avery Archer aims to (i) sort out what agnosticism is (as a distinctive doxastic attitude) and (ii) defend a package of claims about when it’s rationally appropriate. The book starts by laying down seven criteria any good descriptive account should satisfy—e.g., it must require ‘cognitive contact’ with the proposition, explain agnosticism’s ‘neutrality’ and ‘commitment’ to neutrality, allow for ‘spontaneous’ agnosticism, and (controversially) preserve the possibility of ‘agnosticism-involving doxastic inconsistency’ (someone can be irrationally inconsistent by both believing P and being agnostic toward P). With those criteria in hand, Archer then surveys leading contemporary ‘attitudinal’ accounts (Russell, Crawford, Masny, Raleigh, Wagner, Friedman) and argues that each fails at least one criterion, clearing the way for a new positive view.
Archer’s positive proposal is the ‘questioning-attitude account’: to be agnostic toward P is to be in a commitment-involving mental state of sceptically questioning both the truth and the falsity of P—so agnosticism is sui generis (not just a form of belief, disbelief, desire, etc.). On this picture, agnosticism is not defined by being “in inquiry”: Archer rejects the idea that agnosticism essentially entails an inquiring state of mind, arguing instead that the core of agnosticism is its rational appropriateness when one’s competently considered evidence is insufficient to establish either P or ¬P. The book also defends a ‘bipartite’ view of doxastic neutrality: the act of ‘withholding judgement’ typically puts you into the attitude of agnosticism (roughly as judging relates to believing). And it argues there is no practical analogue of agnosticism—no third practical attitude that stands to intending X / intending not-X the way agnosticism stands to belief / disbelief—drawing out consequences for how belief differs from intention and mere “acceptance.”
In the later chapters Archer connects this framework to live debates in epistemology. He argues that pragmatic considerations can sometimes be reasons to remain agnostic (reasons not to believe), even if they cannot be reasons to believe—using this to claim that ‘transparency’-style arguments at best constrain reasons for belief, not reasons for agnosticism, and motivating distinctions like ‘weak’ vs ‘strong’ evidentialism. He also defends a modest (‘weak’) form of permissivism on which, for some evidence e, it can be rationally permissible either to believe P or to be agnostic about P (without committing to permissibility between belief and disbelief), and he argues that agnosticism is the rationally appropriate response to certain cases of revealed peer disagreement. Overall, the book’s upshot is to “give agnosticism its due”: treat it as a distinctive, norm-governed attitude whose central role is to be the fitting doxastic response when our evidence doesn’t settle matters either way.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:47 - Background to book
03:38 - Philosophical relevance of agnosticism
06:52 - Agnosticism and inquiry
08:42 - Consideration criterion
11:26 - Two notions of consideration
17:37 - Basic approach
22:24 - Criticism
25:54 - Rejoinder
27:22 - Descriptive vs. prescriptive
33:02 - Inconsistency criterion
40:00 - Believing and disbelieving simultaneously
45:04 - Attitudinal account
47:28 - Second order beliefs
52:05 - Occurrent attitudes
1:02:25 - Agnosticism and inquiry
1:11:14 - No evidence case
1:14:36 - Alternatives
1:18:57 - Normativity
1:20:47 - Instrumental
1:23:36 - Example
1:26:22 - Other sorts of rationality
1:30:27 - Belief vs. judgment
1:36:13 - Questioning account
1:37:22 - Belief
1:40:37 - Unrealized disposition
1:43:22 - Minimum threshold
1:45:00 - Upshot of account
1:49:03 - Value of philosophy
1:51:08 - Conclusion
