Alexandra Zinke

Recent debates in epistemology have assumed a positive conception of suspension of judgement, according to which suspending requires the presence of a distinctive mental state, either a sui generis indecision-representing attitude or a higher-order belief about one’s doxastic situation. The paper challenges this orthodoxy by arguing that sceptical traditions, in particular Pyrrhonian and Cartesian scepticism, operate with a privative conception of suspension: scepticism does not suggest adopting a positive mental attitude but simply to refrain from both belief and disbelief (given suitable cognitive preconditions). We show that the Pyrrhonian strategy of equipollence and Descartes’ method of doubt do not aim for suspension positively conceived. We tentatively suggest that privative suspension is thus of primary significance for epistemology.

Nicholas J.J. Smith (2014) has argued that there are different kinds of degrees of belief, but that they must be fused into one ‘all kinds considered’ degree of belief. We provide an example which shows that different kinds of degrees of belief can have diverging impacts on the rationality of a decision: there are cases in which two rational subjects with identical preferences and the same ‘all kinds considered’ degree of belief make different decisions. Thus, different kinds of degrees of belief should not be merged into a single degree-of-belief function.

Many recent authors assume that rational inquiry is closely linked to suspension of belief. Some think that suspension is necessary for inquiry, others that it is sufficient, and some think that it is both. My first aim is to reject these views and show that suspension is neither necessary nor sufficient for rational inquiry. The rationality of inquiry does not depend on the subject’s doxastic attitude towards p. My second aim is to propose that, ceteris paribus, the rationality of inquiry into whether p depends on the stability of the subject’s doxastic attitude towards p.

This collection includes twenty original philosophical essays in honour of Wolfgang Spohn. The contributions mirror the scope of Wolfgang Spohn’s work. They address topics from epistemology (e.g., the theory of ranking functions, belief revision, and the nature of knowledge and belief), philosophy of science (e.g., causation, induction, and laws of nature), the philosophy of language (e.g., the theory of meaning and the semantics of counterfactuals), and the philosophy of mind (e.g., intentionality and free will), as well as problems of ontology, logic, the theory of practical rationality, and meta-philosophy. ― Contributors: Ansgar Beckermann, Wolfgang Benkewitz, Bernd Buldt, Ralf Busse, Christoph Fehige, Wolfgang Freitag, Gordian Haas, Volker Halbach, Franz Huber, Andreas Kemmerling, Manfred Kupffer, Hannes Leitgeb, Godehard Link, Arthur Merin, Thomas Müller, Julian Nida-Rümelin, Martine Nida-Rümelin, Hans Rott, Holger Sturm, Thomas Ede Zimmermann, Alexandra Zinke.

The book discusses the central notion of logic: the concept of logical consequence. It shows that the classical definition of consequence as truth preservation in all models must be restricted to all admissible models. The challenge for the philosophy of logic is therefore to supplement the definition with a criterion for admissible models. The problem of logical constants, so prominent in the current debate, constitutes but a special case of this much more general demarcation problem. The book explores the various dimensions of the problem of admissible models and argues that standard responses are unwarranted. As a result, it develops a new vision of logic, suggesting in particular that logic is deeply imbued with metaphysics.

The article argues that there are different ways of justifying suspension of judgement. We suspend judgement not only privatively, that is, because we lack evidence, but also positively, that is, because there is evidence that provides reasons for suspending judgement: suspension is more than the rational fallback position in cases of insufficient evidence. The article applies the distinction to recent discussions about the role of suspension for inquiry, Turri's puzzle about withholding, and formal representations of suspension.

According to the classical invariance criterion, a term is logical if and only if its extension is isomorphism-invariant. However, a number of authors have devised examples that challenge the sufficiency of this condition: accepting these examples as logical constants would introduce objectionable contingent elements into logic. Recently, Gil Sagi has responded that these objections are based on a fallacious inference from the modal status of a sentence to the modal status of the proposition expressed by that sentence. The present paper demonstrates that Sagi’s response, though successful, is futile. There is another objection, based on the same type of example, that is not susceptible to Sagi’s criticism: accepting the examples as logical terms would have the fatal consequence that any contingent metalanguage sentence is entailed by the truth of some logically true object-language sentence. I conclude with a sketch of an alternative to the classical invariance criterion.