Suspending judgment › The Ability to Suspend Judgment

At I.8–10, Sextus describes skepticism as an ability to oppose appearances and judgments in different ways. The opponents need not always be a proposition and its exact negation. What matters for the skeptical encounter is a conflict that leaves the inquirer unable to prefer one side. Arguments can be opposed to other arguments; conflicting appearances can also be brought into the discussion.

This is a demanding condition. The mere existence of disagreement does not establish equipollence. If one explanation strikes the inquirer as decisively better supported on the relevant objections, simply listing the two side by side will not reproduce the state Sextus describes. A modern reader should therefore resist using his modes as a license to give every opinion equal weight before examining it.

Nor does the equal-counterargument formula become a universal theorem that every possible argument must have an equally strong opponent. When Sextus explains that formula at I.202–203, he restricts it to dogmatic arguments examined so far and qualifies it by how they appear to him. At I.196, his account of suspending judgment similarly reports a current condition. Making permanent agnosticism an unchangeable commitment would go beyond these qualifications.