Abstract

According to a classical view, suspension of judgement is, like belief and disbelief, a cognitive state. However, as some authors (Crawford 2022; Lord 2020; McGrath 2021a, 2021b; Sosa 2019, 2021) have pointed out, to suspend judgement is also to perform a certain mental action. The main goal of this article is to defend a precise account of the action that we take when we suspend our judgement: the Preventing Account. The Preventing Account has both the advantage of (i) accounting for familiar situations in which subjects suspend judgements and (ii) of explaining the tendency, which is widespread in the philosophical tradition (from sceptics to pragmatists), to consider suspension of judgement as something that is (at least, to some degree) difficult to achieve.