Suspension Of Judgment Research Articles

The Operation Called Suspension of Judgement in the History of Political Thought

The postulate of equipollence is the main argument of Pyrrhonian sceptics who assert the equality of current positive beliefs about the world with regard to being convincing or unconvincing. In sceptical reasoning, suspension of judgement follows from the manifest absence of an ultimate point of reference. Several major exponents of the Cambridge School have championed a sceptical approach to the history of political thought. They assert the equipollence of competing interpretations of the intentions of historical thinkers and eschew facile conclusions. They also claim that their insights can be brought to bear politically. The latter claim, however, seems to presuppose a set of convictions which sceptics generally do not hold. Drawing on the theory of critical rationalism I discuss whether the retrenchment of the possibility of certain historical knowledge carried out by the authors of the Cambridge School narrows the scope of political action thus defeating the authors’ own claim to be engaged in the furthering of critical reason.

Rogerian Style of Interpersonal Communication: Why is it not so Simple?

Carl Ransom Rogers was the only psychologist nominated for the Noble Prize. His whole professional life focused on major questions, such as, how to facilitate the process of interpersonal communication? What are the most important prerequisites of effective, aiming at mutual understanding, communication? Why people are so often unable to accurately communicate, even though they do not suffer from any form of speech and language pathology? According to Rogers, the crucial components of effective human to human contact are surprisingly simple in theory. Equally unexpected is that they are very difficult to implement into daily practice. Rogers's main concepts can be signaled by simple terms: non-directive approach, active person centered listening, transparency, congruency, unconditional positive regard, empathy and suspension of judgment. In the first part of our article, we review the Rogerian major frame of thinking and we add some comments on it. In the second section of our paper, we indicate selected obstacles disrupting practical use of his style of communication e.g. work overload and burnout, or disturbances caused by personality disorders.

Differential Diagnosis and the Suspension of Judgment

In this paper I argue that ethics and evidence are intricately intertwined within the clinical practice of differential diagnosis. Too often, when a disease is difficult to diagnose, a physician will dismiss it as being "not real" or "all in the patient's head." This is both an ethical and an evidential problem. In the paper my aim is two-fold. First, via the examination of two case studies (late-stage Lyme disease and Addison's disease), I try to elucidate why this kind of dismissal takes place. Then, I propose a potential solution to the problem. I argue that instead of dismissing a patient's illness as "not real," physicians ought to exercise a compassionate suspension of judgment when a diagnosis cannot be immediately made. I argue that suspending judgment has methodological, epistemic, and ethical virtues and therefore should always be preferred to patient dismissal in the clinical setting.

A Puzzle About the Agnostic Response to Peer Disagreement

The paper argues that the view to the effect that one should suspend judgment in the face of a disagreement with a recognised epistemic peer results in a puzzle when applied to disagreements in which one party is agnostic. The puzzle is this: either the agnostic party retains her suspension of judgment, or she suspends it. The former option is discarded by proponents of the agnostic response; the latter leads the agnostic response to undermine itself.

From Paranoia to Suspension of Judgment: Based on The Crying of Lot 49

From Paranoia to Suspension of Judgment: Based on The Crying of Lot 49

Two Reasons Why Epistemic Reasons Are Not Object‐Given Reasons

AbstractIn this paper I discuss two claims; the first is the claim that state‐given reasons for belief are of a radically different kind to object‐given reasons for belief. The second is that, where this last claim is true, epistemic reasons are object‐given reasons for belief (EOG). I argue that EOG has two implausible consequences: (i) that suspension of judgement can never be epistemically justified, and (ii) that the reason that epistemically justifies a belief that p can never be the reason for which one believes that p.

O exercício da epoché e as variações do transcendente na fenomenologia de Edmund Husserl

The epoche is initially on what is transcendent in the sense of what is outside intellectual experience. Attention is focused on what is revealed in the cogitatio. But Husserl goes beyond of the so-called “certainty of cogitatio” by generalizing the suspension of judgment. The transcendent is to be understood as the domain where we cannot eliminate the possibility of doubt as to the position of existence of things and the empirical self. Despite immanence, the intended object does not lose, in its reduced version, its otherness. We then see a third use of the term “transcendent”. This reduction reveals a new dimension of the relationship between consciousness and the world, preventing authentic immanent objectivity from disappearing. Key words: phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, consciousness, world, transcendent.

Investigative and Suspensive Scepticism

AbstractSextus Empiricus portrays the Pyrrhonian sceptics in two radically different ways. On the one hand, he describes them as inquirers or examiners, and insists that what distinguishes them from all the other philosophical schools is their persistent engagement in inquiry. On the other hand, he insists that the main feature of Pyrrhonian attitude is suspension of judgement about everything. Many have argued that a consistent account of Sextan scepticism as both investigative and suspensive is not possible. The main obstacle to characterizing Pyrrhonism as both investigative and suspensive is the fact that it seems that the mature sceptics, after they have suspended judgement and thus reached tranquillity, have no motivation for further inquiry. Any inquiry they seem to be interested in after they have suspended judgement is the refutation of (relevant) beliefs needed for maintaining tranquillity. I try to show that the mature sceptics' removal of distress does not ipso facto mean removal of the desire for knowledge. This is because distress is not just a matter of unsatisfied desire, but of belief that one of the opposed appearances must be true, or, more generally, of belief that the truth is the only worthwhile epistemic goal. Having abandoned this belief, the sceptics can still engage in philosophical inquiries. This is because Sextus does not assume that philosophy is the search for truth: it is so only for the dogmatists. In a more general sense, applicable to the sceptics as well, philosophy is just an inquiry into certain things, and for the sceptics, its epistemic goal is still open.

HUELLAS DEL RELATIVISMO DE PROTÁGORAS EN EL ESCEPTICISMO ANTIGUO

The present article puts forward the existing relations between the thought of Protagoras and of the scepticism represented by Pyrrho from Elis. Analyzing the concept of contradictions and putting in context the declaration of impossibility to contradict that the sophist would support, it shows up to what point his ontological conception, based on the fluctuation and the constant construction of the mundane reality on the part of every man, carries the impossibility to come to contradictions, even when two propositions contradict one another. On a very near ontology, Pyrrho assumes the impossibility of speaking, also as a consequence of the apprehension of the reality on the part of man. The suspension of judgment (epoché), the indifference (adiaphoría), the impassivity (apátheia), the tranquillity (ataraxía) are, in the ground of action, the correspondence of aphasía in the ground of speech. The thought of this ancient sceptic gathers thus the line of ontological relativist conception of Protagoras, deepening even someone of its features.

Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition

To answer why the United States, among Western democracies, still utilizes the death penalty, the Scottish-born sociologist and lawyer David Garland sets out to “describe and explain the peculiar institution of American capital punishment in all its complex, controversial detail and to explore its relationship to the society that sustains it” (p. 7). In doing so, he seeks to employ “a measure of detachment—a suspension of judgment in the interests of clear-eyed description and objective analysis” (ibid.). The result is a comprehensive and penetrating criminological study that avoids the moralistic claims of both advocates and opponents of capital punishment to reveal the evolution of a complicated and ambivalent system—one that retains the death penalty as law in 35 of 50 states and the federal government, holding more than 3,200 offenders on death row, yet which lately executes fewer than 60 persons per year and aims to carry out each execution as painlessly as possible. Using a multidisciplinary, largely sociological approach, Garland, a professor at New York University, draws heavily from secondary historical sources to trace the development of American capital punishment from the founding of the republic to the present day.

A university course in mindful viewing: Understanding art and self through contemplative experience

This enquiry has two goals. First, it explores the benefits of a university art education course designed to develop mindfulness and initiate student appreciation of other world-views through art. Students at the undergraduate and graduate level were encouraged to create and use daily insight practices that would enable appreciation of unfamiliar artists, as well as visual works of other cultures. Through contemplative viewing, journal writing, discussion and art making, students developed what Dustin and Ziegler refer to as a ‘practical recovery of intuitive vision’, which can be explained as an everyday activity connected to either viewing or creating something that one values. The second goal of this writing is to suggest the necessity of developing a viewing practice built upon mindfulness as a creative act in order to explore art deeply. Mindful viewing and the reflection on one’s practice expands to an appreciation of others’ experiences in creating and living with their art. Contemplative viewing also gifts the viewer with the suspension of judgement about unfamiliar art long enough to appreciate what cannot always be understood in an initial viewing encounter.

William James’s Ethical Republic

For William James (1842-1910), all philosophical problems were ultimately ethical. In Pragmatism (1907), James invoked the logical theory of his friend Charles Peirce to argue the of any belief consisted solely in conduct it is fitted to produce. There difference in abstract he elaborated, that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. Indeed, James concluded truth not reflected in the consequences of conduct but shaped by them: Truth is he wrote, just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience.1 This major thesis of Pragmatism distilled a career spent describing an unfinished world, in which human thoughts and actions made differences for which thinkers and actors were responsible. As early as 1878, James insisted beliefs imply to advance goals, creating effects valued in light of those goals. mind, he reiterated in his 1890 masterpiece Principles of Psychology, is a fighter for ends, and thinking, a act. Later, in The Will to Believe (1896), James argued when evidence is inconclusive, belief might create conditions in which hypotheses could be verified and potential goods realized - or lost. That frank (if often overlooked) assessment of the moral risks as well as rewards of intellectual life echoed James's most explicitly ethical work, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life (1891), where he asserted when choosing what to believe, it is simply our total character and personal genius are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and use of also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or incapacity for moral life.2In short, James, as John Dewey elegized in 1910, was everywhere and always the moralist.3 Yet for much of the twentieth century critics deemed James's philosophy ethically vacuous, a warrant for moral solipsism. In 1909, Bertrand Russell criticized James for privileging belief over suspension of judgment, and thus encouraging people to live in private moral universes rather than seek objective grounding for common values. Today, some intellectual historians continue to echo Russell and likeminded contemporaries, judging ethical pragmatism tantamount to moral relativism, even moral apathy.4 Others, acknowledging James's impassioned pronouncements on lynching, industrial conflict, imperialist expansion, and other public moral issues, have interpreted them as expressing a particularly cosmopolitan but otherwise unremarkable American liberalism, rather than a coherent moral philosophy.5These criticisms are unfounded, but understandable. They reflect a general antipathy toward James's broader conceptions of knowledge, truth, and experience, and frustration with his unorthodox mode of philosophizing. In Pragmatism, James followed Peirce in arguing beliefs are not copies of reality, but rules for action resembling the probabilistic predictions guiding scientific inquiry. James, however, extended Peirce's argument, claiming there is no static reality beliefs can once-for-all describe. A self-proclaimed radical empiricist, James held the universe is pluralistic, and the only reality accessible to human minds is constantly changing - not least through the ceaseless flux of human consciousness, a fact as natural and consequential as any other.6 This blurring of subject-object distinctions scandalized contemporaries. It also underpinned James's equally scandalous claim ideas not only demonstrate their meaning through conduct, but derive both meaning and value from their origins and verification in human activity. To ask what is true in such a world to ask which ideas, moral or otherwise, allow people to navigate it successfully - which carry us prosperously from any one of our experience to any other part - and which do not. …

Mentalist evidentialism vindicated (and a super-blooper epistemic design problem for proper function justification)

Michael Bergmann seeks to motivate his externalist, proper function theory of epistemic justification by providing three objections to the mentalism and mentalist evidentialism characteristic of nonexternalists such as Richard Feldman and Earl Conee. Bergmann argues that (i) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that justification depends on mental states; (ii) mentalism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of an epistemic input to a belief-forming process must be due to an essential feature of that input, and, relatedly, that mentalist evidentialism is committed to the false thesis that the epistemic fittingness of doxastic response B to evidence E is an essential property of B–E; and (iii) mentalist evidentialism is “unmotivated”. I object to each argument. The argument for (i) begs the question. The argument for (ii) suffers from the fact that mentalist evidentialists are not committed to the consequences claimed for them; nevertheless, I show that there is, in the neighborhood, a substantive dispute concerning the nature of doxastic epistemic fittingness. That dispute involves what I call “Necessary Fittingness”, the view that, necessarily, exactly one (at most) doxastic attitude (belief, or disbelief, or suspension of judgment) toward a proposition is epistemically fitting with respect to a person’s total evidence at any time. Reflection on my super-blooper epistemic design counterexamples to Bergmann’s proper function theory reveals both the plausibility of Necessary Fittingness and a good reason to deny (iii). Mentalist evidentialism is thus vindicated against the objections.

McLuhan and the Humanities

McLuhan and the Humanities Richard Cavell (bio) One of the constants of McLuhan criticism and biography is that his training as a scholar of Renaissance English literature and its debt to the rhetorical tradition, coupled with his lifelong interest in English literary modernism, especially Joyce and Eliot, morphed into his foundational theories of mediation. McLuhan’s literary studies were undoubtedly crucial to his theories of how media shape messages. But what was to be the afterlife of these insights for the study of literature and for the humanities at large? What was to be their fate in the postliterate era, an era into which we have fully entered with Wikipedia, Google, the digital library, and e-books? McLuhan addressed the philosophical and pedagogical implications of this question in a lecture he gave to the Humanities Association of Canada in Montreal in June 1961 and subsequently published in the Humanities Association Bulletin. Tellingly, McLuhan’s first citation is from business management guru Peter Drucker, who wrote in Landmarks of Tomorrow that he first realized “the immediate relevance of encyclopedic liberal knowledge” when he turned from philosophy to management studies (McLuhan, “Humanities” 3; the paraphrase is McLuhan’s). What Drucker meant by this is that in [End Page 14] the corporate world—a world which, for McLuhan, was the one we now occupied by virtue of the fact that we had extended ourselves prosthetically through vast corpora of mediation—the impact of research was immediate. Liberal education becomes, in this context, an immense Bauhaus project, at once an embodiment of modernist aesthetic ideals (the total work of art) and an instance of applied knowledge in a social context. With his typical verve, McLuhan comments that “the corporations are much more aware of their need for high-level education than are the universities. The Ciceronian ideal of the doctus orator is current again” (3). This is so because the electronic age, with its onslaught of information vectors, demands a form of knowledge based on pattern recognition, and it was this sensitivity to patterns of expression that distinguished the orator, for whom knowledge was ultimately performative. Thus McLuhan did not take flight from the incursion of the technological into the pedagogical. On the contrary, it was precisely because art was by definition the discourse which discerned patterns—because it was about form rather than about content (and here we see the legacy of the Modernists in McLuhan’s media theory)—that it was now more than ever crucial to contemporary society. Citing expat Canadian Kenneth Galbraith’s “Economics and Art” (a chapter in The Liberal Hour), McLuhan notes that the Harvard economist “ridicules the old commercial notion of arts as frivolity,” arguing that the arts now form a “navigational guide” in contemporary culture (“Humanities” 3). Comments such as these did not endear McLuhan to his English department colleagues at the University of Toronto; as Doug Coupland remarks in his recent biofiction about McLuhan, “[m]ost of Marshall’s colleagues … viewed him as a nutbar” (127). We have to remember, however, that those colleagues were publishing articles in the same issue of The Humanities Bulletin with titles like “Mill and Arnold: Liberty and Culture—Friends or Enemies?” and reviewing books with titles like Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans. McLuhan comments on this recourse to traditionalism in times of rapid change, noting that “the panic for permanence drives us into ever greater depth understanding” (4). He notes this “without enthusiasm.” The vast explosions of information that confront us, he argued, demand breadth—pattern recognition. As Bertrand Russell remarked, and as McLuhan loved quoting, “the great achievement of the twentieth century [is] the technique of suspended judgment. That is, the discovery of the process of insight itself” (4). [End Page 15] McLuhan’s approach to this injunction was to study effects: the “assembly line” of segmented knowledge yields under electronic organicism to “galaxy clusters of simultaneous operations” (6). This comment is resonant with an article in The New York Times published last November and provocatively titled “A New Enlightenment: Digital Keys to the Humanities’ Riches.” In that article, Patricia Cohen argues that the successor to formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism, etc., will...

How to stay true to our science: Three principles to guide our behavior.

The ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) was last known to exist in 1944. Unexpectedly, in 2004, it was purportedly seen near Brinkley, Arkansas. This claim resulted in a scientific expedition that produced inconclusive video that was used to confirm the bird's reemergence from extinction, article in Science magazine extolling the excitement that the bird was indeed back, and a worldwide fascination towards a species supposedly extinct but now here again. Yet, despite over 5 years of searching at a cost of over $10 million, there remains no physical proof that the woodpecker is in fact alive (Radford, 2009). At a 2004 Florida conference about treatment for Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), a medical doctor spoke to a group of parents about electromagnetic fields and their impact on autism. The doctor asked one parent if she used cell phones, to which the parent replied in the affirmative. With a grand wave of the hand, the doctor pronounced, throw them out! advocating for the unproven belief that the electrical energy emanating from cellular phones was somehow either responsible for or negatively impacting the symptoms of this neurological disorder. When confronted with claims that are presented as true, how can we make a reasonable evaluation to ascertain, as confidently as possible, whether the claim has merit? This fundamental question impacts virtually all areas of our society. Claims abound--of alien abductions, the existence of the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot, and the eating of wild boar meat to cure autism. How can we separate the wheat from the chaff in a way that both prevents the acceptance of wildly suspicious claims that have no support, and permits adoption, with some level of certainty and comfort, claims that are likely to in fact be true? The best way known to evaluate claims is to adopt the intellectual discipline of science and the scientific method of investigation. This methodology involves (1) adopting philosophic or skepticism (e.g., Cooper, Heron, & Heward, 2007) and (2) conducting controlled experiments that (3) minimize threats to internal validity. Practicing skepticism is crucial to protecting oneself from believing unsubstantiated claims. Though the American public views science's effect on society as positive (in a recent survey, 84% of respondents said that the effect of science was mostly positive and that the scientists were ranked as the third-most contributing profession to society, after the military and teachers; American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2009), the continued adoption of unproven beliefs, claims, and bizarre treatments (particularly in the field of autism) remains strong, suggesting that although science is lauded, skepticism--and scientific thinking in general--is not widely practiced. The use of experimentation is the most rigorous of the levels of science (Cooper, et al., 2007), because of the use of systematic manipulation of variables to test the existence of causal relationships. Skepticism is not a view that promotes the disbelief of every truth or claim (Normand, 2008). Skepticism is more refined. Merriam-Webster Online (2010) defines it as, an attitude or doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or towards a particular object. The word is from the Greek skeptikos, meaning inquirer or investigator (DiCarlo, 2009). Pigliucci (2009) defines skepticism closer to the original Greek meaning as the suspension of judgment (either to adopt or reject) until sufficient evidence is examined. Kurtz (2010) stresses this perspective with his discussion of skeptical inquiry, approach that promotes the examiner to .. .seek, when feasible, adequate evidence and reasonable grounds for any claim to truth in any context. (p. 21, as quoted in Normand, 2008). Claims of all kinds should be, before adoption or rejection, examined for the amount and quality of evidence that supports them. …

The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment

Reviewed by: The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment Karen Pagani Thorne, Christian. The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 376. Christian Thorne’s The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment is a highly provocative and remarkably erudite study on the pre-history of anti-foundationalist thought. Thorne’s aim, broadly, is to call into question the widely held (though less and less confidently articulated) belief among contemporary theorists of the Left that attacks on metaphysics, on epistemology, on claims to universality, humanism and, of course, the Enlightenment contain the (ever-deferred) promise of political reform simply by virtue of their predilection for “self-defeating concepts, concepts that resist the very abstraction to which they are otherwise addicted” (312). Opposing this view, Thorne’s conceptual-historical account reminds us that “anti-foundationalism is not everywhere the same” and that theories that tend “to convert early modern skeptics into post-structuralists before the fact” amount to little more than “an epistemological determinism fully as egregious as the economic or technological determinisms that have preceded it” (13). With admirable clarity, the Introduction sets up the stakes of the project: critical theory always strives to be something other than philosophy insofar as, in its attempts to “plunge thought back into the material [End Page 139] world so that it may, at last, spring it loose therefrom,” it aims to “undo the false distinction between thought and action” (10) that has always served as philosophy’s alibi. Althusser, Adorno and Horkheimer, Eagleton, Foucault and Canguilhem, Luhmann, Cavell—Thorne is talking about “almost all critical theory” (10) so the list is, as one might expect, long— have imparted onto theory a pronounced skepticism toward “the eternal essences or spirit that philosophy takes to be the object of all thought.” This skepticism, with which we are by now all too familiar, is marked by hostility toward reification, facts, presence, concepts, instrumental rationalities, truth claims—the usual suspects (10). What is, by Thorne’s lights, lacking in critical theory is “an account of the changing ways in which human societies have refused to know” and, most importantly, the political agendas that informed and directed such refusals. Thorne seeks to fill this void by taking “the critical emphasis off the Enlightenment,” and turning his attention instead to another tradition, that of skepticism (16). The bulk of The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment is comprised of what the author himself refers to as a series of case studies. These studies meticulously tease out the often overlooked political agendas of many of the skeptical thinkers from whom anti-foundationalist thought has taken its cue. In Thorne’s pre-history, theory is unapologetically portrayed as the bastard (or, perhaps more correctly, estranged) child of a long tradition of skepticism toward metaphysics, epistemology and knowledge itself. Far from carrying within it the germ for reform and radical politics, Thorne argues that the skeptical tradition to which anti-foundationalist thought owes its argumentative forms has historically been one of the most tenacious foot-soldiers of authoritarian pragmatism, “a means of defending established (but increasingly contested) practices without claiming these practices to be true” (11). The sheer density of The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment makes it nearly impossible to paraphrase. There are, however, a few key analyses that need to be detailed here, though much will necessarily be given short shrift. The book is made up of three parts, each divided into three chapters. Parts II and III address the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively. Part I examines the writings of Sextus Empiricus and Michel de Montaigne in relation to their particular political contexts. Chapter one gives the reader practice in thinking skeptically. It consists in a textual analysis of Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism, “a kind of skeptical handbook, a compendium of arguments designed to fluster the philosophers,” the “ur-text for the many anti-foundationalisms that will follow” (24; 314). This early chapter underscores what readers today might otherwise overlook: that the suspension of judgment and the refusal of knowledge stemming from the Pyrrhonist’s capacity to [End Page 140] systematically debate both sides of the argument need not be radical. The Pyrrhonist, according to Thorne’s reading, is a case...

THE POTENTIAL FOR CONSCIOUSNESS OF ARTIFICIAL SYSTEMS

The question about the potential for consciousness of artificial systems has often been addressed using thought experiments, which are often problematic in the philosophy of mind. A more promising approach is to use real experiments to gather data about the correlates of consciousness in humans, and develop this data into theories that make predictions about human and artificial consciousness. A key issue with an experimental approach is that consciousness can only be measured using behavior, which places fundamental limits on our ability to identify the correlates of consciousness. This paper formalizes these limits as a distinction between type I and type II potential correlates of consciousness (PCCs). Since it is not possible to decide empirically whether type I PCCs are necessary for consciousness, it is indeterminable whether a machine that lacks neurons or hemoglobin, for example, is potentially conscious. A number of responses have been put forward to this problem, including suspension of judgment, liberal and conservative attribution of the potential for consciousness and a psychometric scale that models our judgment about the relationship between type I PCCs and consciousness.

Auditors' Skeptical Characteristics and Their Relationship to Skeptical Judgments and Decisions

The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine the relationship between auditors’ skeptical characteristics and skeptical judgments and decisions. Despite the importance of auditor skepticism, as recognized by auditing standards, regulators, and practice, there is a lack of consensus and empirical data on the identification of auditor’s skeptical characteristics, how they are measured and the extent to which skeptical characteristics map with auditors’ skeptical judgments and decisions. Gaining insight on these issues has important implications for auditor recruitment and training, guidance to provide in audit tools, and future research. Three widely recognized skeptical characteristics from the psychology and auditing literatures are examined: (1) interpersonal trust; (2) suspension of judgment; and (3) locus of control. Furthermore, a comprehensive professional skepticism scale developed for the field of auditing is also considered. Finally, to examine the effect of client risks, the influence of control environment strength on the relationship between skeptical characteristics and auditors’ judgments and decisions is examined. An experimental study is conducted to address these issues involving a sample of 376 auditors from offices of the Big Four auditing firms in the Netherlands with experience ranging from staff to partner. The results show that the strength of the relationship between the alternative skeptical characteristics and skeptical judgments and decisions varies significantly. Overall, interpersonal trust displays the highest significance in predicting skeptical judgments and decisions. However, the relationship between auditors’ skeptical characteristics and skeptical judgments and decisions appears to be dependent on the strength of the control environment.

Quantifiers and propositional attitudes: Quine revisited

Quine introduced a famous distinction between the ‘notional’ sense and the ‘relational’ sense of certain attitude verbs. The distinction is both intuitive and sound but is often conflated with another distinction Quine draws between ‘dyadic’ and ‘triadic’ (or higher degree) attitudes. I argue that this conflation is largely responsible for the mistaken view that Quine’s account of attitudes is undermined by the problem of the ‘exportation’ of singular terms within attitude contexts. Quine’s system is also supposed to suffer from the problem of ‘suspended judgement with continued belief’. I argue that this criticism fails to take account of a crucial presupposition of Quine’s about the connection between thought and language. The aim of the paper is to defend the spirit of Quine’s account of attitudes by offering solutions to these two problems.

Lorenzo Valla and Quattrocento Scepticism

AbstractLorenzo Valla (1406-1457) has often been considered to be a sceptic. Equipped with an extremely polemical and critical mind, his whole oeuvre seemed to aim at undermining received philosophical and theological dogmas. More specifically he has been associated with the burgeoning interests in ancient scepticism in the fifteenth century. In this article the arguments in support of this interpretation will be critically examined and evaluated. Based on a discussion of two of his major works, De vero bono and the Dialectica, it will be shown that Valla was not a sceptic. Even though the first work betrays the techniques of the Academy as employed by Cicero, the appropriation of these strategies served an agenda which can hardly be called 'sceptical'. The second work contains his reform of Aristotelian dialectic, which seems to testify to a sceptical interest in arguments which rely on verisimilitude and dubious validity such as sorites and paradox. But rather than reflecting an endorsement of Academic scepticism, this work, on closer reading, shows Valla to be highly critical on such arguments. This raises the question of how scepticism is related to rhetoric. Their similarities and differences will be discussed in the final section: Valla the Christian orator was no proponent of doubt, uncertainty and a suspension of judgement, even though at times he used strategies derived from Academic scepticism.