In this chapter, I advance a non-reductive, proposition-directed, sui generis account of agnosticism called the questioning-attitude account. The questioning-attitude account is non-reductive because it denies that agnosticism is reducible to other mental states like belief, desire, or intention. It is a proposition-directed account because it holds that the object of agnosticism is a proposition, as opposed to a question or another mental state. It is a sui generis account because it holds that unlike belief, which involves an affirming stance towards a proposition, or disbelief, which involves a denying stance towards a proposition, agnosticism involves a distinct questioning stance towards a proposition.

In this chapter, I summarise the central theses defended in my monograph and explain how they fit together to provide us with a more complete picture of the nature and normative significance of agnosticism. I conclude that agnosticism is best conceived of as the mental state of questioning both the truth and falsity of some proposition, P – which can, but need not, be preceded by the mental act of refraining from judging P to be true or false – and is rationally appropriate whenever we take our evidence for and against P to be inconclusive.

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 contend that there is no practical attitude that stands to intending to do X and intending not to do X as agnosticism towards P stands to believing P and disbelieving P. In short, there is no practical analogue to agnosticism. Call this the non-existence thesis. I defend the non-existence thesis against potential objections and highlight some of its implications for the norms governing belief and intention.

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.

In this chapter, I advocate for a bipartite act-attitude account of doxastic neutrality, according to which the mental act of withholding judgement stands to the attitude of agnosticism as the mental act of judging stands to the attitude of belief. My proposed account stands in contrast with that of Matthew McGrath, who argues that there are at least three distinct ways of being neutral – namely agnosticism, refraining from judgement, and suspension of judgement. I argue that suspension of judgement, as conceived of by McGrath, is not a distinct way of being neutral. This leaves only the mental act of refraining from judgement (or what I call ‘withholding judgement’) and the mental state of agnosticism as the two genuine ways of being doxastically neutral.

In this chapter, I defend the thesis that there may be pragmatic reasons to be agnostic. Given that agnosticism is one of the possible outcomes of doxastic deliberation – that is deliberation about whether to believe P – it follows that pragmatic considerations may determine the outcome of doxastic deliberation. However, while I hold that pragmatic considerations may be reasons to refrain from belief, I deny that they may be reason to believe.

In this chapter, I vet various criteria for a satisfactory account of agnosticism that have been proposed in the literature. I conclude that a satisfactory account of agnosticism should satisfy the following seven criteria: (1) Cognitive Contact, (2) Inconsistency, (3) Spontaneity, (4) Termination, (5) Neutrality, (6) Commitment, and (7) Appropriateness.

In this chapter, I apply the criteria vetted in Chapter 2 to the non-attitudinal accounts of Russell and Crawford, the metacognitive accounts of Masny and Raleigh, Wagner’s endorsed-indecision account, and Friedman’s question-directed attitude account. I demonstrate that each account fails to satisfy one or more of the criteria for a satisfactory descriptive account of agnosticism.

John Gould’s father was a gardener. A very, very good one – good enough to be head of the Royal Gardens at Windsor. John apprenticed, too, becoming a gardener in his own right at Ripley Castle, Yorkshire, in 1825. As good as he was at flowers and trees, birds became young John Gould’s true passion early in life. Like John Edmonstone, John Gould (1804–1881) adopted Charles Waterton’s preservation techniques that kept taxidermied bird feathers crisp and vibrant for decades (some still exist in museums today), and he began to employ the technique to make extra cash. He sold preserved birds and their eggs to fancy Eton schoolboys near his father’s work. His collecting side-hustle soon landed him a professional post: curator and preserver of the new Zoological Society of London. They paid him £100 a year, a respectable sum for an uneducated son of a gardener, though not enough to make him Charles Darwin’s social equal (Darwin initially received a £400 annual allowance from his father plus £10,000 as a wedding present).

Darwin claimed that On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was only an “abstract” of that much longer book he had begun to write in 1856, after his irreverent meeting with J. D. Hooker, T. H. Huxley, and T. V. Wollaston, and Lyell’s exasperated encouragement in May. But he never completed that larger book. Instead, he worked on plants and pigeons and collected information through surveys from other naturalists and professional specimen hunters like Alfred Russel Wallace for the better part of a decade.

For all their scientific prowess and public renown, there is no comparable Lyell-ism, Faraday-ism, Einstein-ism, Curie-ism, Hawking-ism, or deGrasse-Tyson-ism. So, there must be something even more powerful than scientific ideas alone caught in the net of this ism attached to Darwin. And whatever the term meant, it’s fair to say that Darwinism frightened Bryan.

Historian Everett Mendelsohn was intrigued. In the middle of writing a review of an annual survey of academic publications in the History of Science, he marveled that an article in that volume contained almost 40 pages’ worth of references to works on Darwin published in just the years between 1959 and 1963. Almost 200 works published in a handful of years – no single figure in the history of science commanded such an impressive academic following. Yet Mendelsohn noted that, paradoxically, no one had written a proper biography of Darwin by 1965. Oh sure, there was commentary. Lots of commentary. But so many of the authors were retired biologists who had a tendency toward hagiography or, the opposite, with axes to grind.

Meeting the “White Raja of Sarawak” in Singapore in 1853 had been a stroke of luck. Honestly, it could have been a major turning point in what had been an unlucky career so far for 30-year-old collector Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) (Figure 4.1). But the steep, rocky, sweaty climb up Borneo’s Mt. Serembu (also known as Bung Moan or Bukit Peninjau) in the last week of December 1855 wasn’t exactly what Wallace expected. His eyeglasses fogged in the humidity. Bamboo taller than buildings crowded the narrow path. Near the top, the rainforest finally parted. But it revealed neither a temple nor some sort of massive colonial complex with all the trappings of empire worthy of a “raja.” Instead, there leaned a modest, very un-colonial-ruler-like white cabin. When he saw it, Wallace literally called it “rude.”

Charles Darwin spent nearly the whole of his writing career attempting to convince his colleagues, the general public, and, by extension, you and me, that change occurs gradually. Tiny slivers of difference accumulate over time like grains of sand in a vast hourglass. Change happens, in other words. It’s painfully slow, but it’s inevitable. By implication, two organisms that look different enough to us to be classified as separate species share, many tens of thousands or even millions of generations back, the same ancestors. (Inbreeding means we don’t even need to go back quite that many generations to demonstrate overlap, but you get the point.) But change that gradual means, as Darwin himself well recognized, that looking for “missing links” would be a pretty silly errand. Differences between one generation and the next look to our eyes just like common variation. It’s one grain falling from the top of the hourglass to the bottom. You can’t perceive the change. You would have to go back in time to find the very first individuals who possessed a particular trait – bat-like wings, say, or human-ish hands – and then, turning to their parents, you would see something almost identical.

Transmutation. “Evolutio,” if you wanted to be fancy and Italian about it. Whatever you want to call it, the grand unrolling of one type into another, connecting all living things into a single tree of life was all the rage among the society gentlemen. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, an influential Scottish judge in the 1700s, had said shocking things about it. Monboddo’s metaphysics separated humans from brutes by only the thinnest slice of cognition. And imagine how he scandalized the chattering classes when, according to rumor anyway, he suggested perhaps tails even lingered, dangling from the spinal cords of the underdeveloped. They called him an “eccentric,” a fusty, argumentative judge and a voracious reader. Perhaps too learned – genius and madness, you know.

The Good News finally snagged him. In late September 1881, he was near the end, bedridden, languishing in a soft purple robe, still able to read, though he always preferred to be read to. Lady Hope entered the drawing room at the top of the stairs quietly, respectfully, as the golden hour gently illuminated corn fields and English oak forests through his picturesque bay window. The faintest crown of white hair encircled his head in the late afternoon light; the rest was wizardly beard (Figure 6.1). Lady Hope, the well-known evangelist, was visiting the Darwins, and she approached the old scientist cautiously. But she needn’t have. In his wrinkled hands he held the Bible, open to the New Testament Epistle of Hebrews. “The Royal Book,” Darwin called it, serenely, mentioning a few favored passages.

The stone is still there in the garden. That’s what gets me. It’s not the house itself – houses decay slowly and can be preserved pretty easily, especially in Britain where even an eighteenth-century country house is not “old.” It’s not even the tree behind the house, alive when Charles Darwin still lived in his Down House, now propped up by guywires against inevitable collapse as a kind of totem of the great naturalist’s existence. If you leave the rear exit, the one that takes you to Darwin’s preserved greenhouse and the stunning flora on a pretty path lined in that particular English way of making the perfectly manicured seem somehow “natural,” you might glance to the left and see behind a small iron fence a one-foot-wide stone. A round mill stone or pottery wheel, it was, or appears to have been.