Doubt
To be in doubt about a proposition is to withhold assent both from it and from its contradictory. Although people sometimes withhold assent with no reason for doing so and persist in this even after conceding that they have no reason, doubt is rational only when one has a reason for it and reasonable only when the reason is a good one. Doubt may be accompanied by various feelings, but it seems unlikely that there are specific feelings uniquely associated with it; in general, the feelings associated with doubt are anxiety or hesitation, which are identified as feelings of doubt when they arise in contexts involving questions of belief. In any case, philosophers are not ordinarily concerned with psychological characterizations of a doubter's state of mind. Their attention is primarily devoted to understanding the conditions under which doubt is reasonable and to defining the limits of reasonable doubt.
Evidence and Reasonable Doubt
Whether it is reasonable for a person to doubt a proposition cannot always be decided solely by considering the evidence that the person possesses relevant to the proposition or, in a situation in which there is purportedly noninferential knowledge, by considering his ground for assent. Doubts that are unreasonable or absurd in one situation may be quite reasonable in another, although the available evidence or ground is the same in both cases.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 2,253 words (approx. 8 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Doubt Access Pass.
