In this chapter, I mount a sustained argument against Friedman’s claim that one is agnostic about whether P if and only if one is in an inquiring state of mind about whether P. I reject the claim that an inquiring state of mind entails agnosticism on the grounds that it fails to accommodate cases in which an agent inquires with the aim of ratcheting up an instance of (justified) believing to the status of knowledge or an instance of knowledge to the status of complete certainty. I reject the claim that agnosticism entails being in an inquiring state of mind on the grounds that it fails to accommodate cases in which a subject is agnostic towards P but are unmotivated to inquire about whether P because they believe or know that the question of whether P is unanswerable.

In this chapter, I detail some of the main considerations that have led contemporary epistemologist to largely reject non-attitudinal accounts, which conceive of agnosticism chiefly in terms of a combined absence of belief and disbelief, in favour of views that see agnosticism as involving one or more attitudes. I conclude with a brief survey of the major contemporary attitudinal accounts of agnosticism.