If you’re considering a question, you have three choices: believe, disbelieve, or suspend judgment. Of these three, suspension tends to enjoy, implicitly or even explicitly, the privilege of a perceived ‘default’ status. Epistemologists are quick to emphasise respects in which judgments can be too hasty, or when a combination of attitudes would be irrational. Descartes starts his Meditations with the worry that some of his beliefs may be wrong—so he shifts into suspension, until he can certify his methods as trustworthy. Descartes’s project is familiar, and by and large, analytic philosophy has mostly worked in that paradigm. Until you have enough evidence, play it safe, and suspend judgment.

I will suggest that the neutrality often attributed to suspension is often unwarranted. Suspension is not epistemically best by default. Failure to believe—undue skepticism—can be just as epistemically erroneous as can hasty belief—undue gullibility. (What if Descartes were motivated by the idea of not letting any truths get past him?) I’ll work towards this case from three perspectives: the epistemology of the a priori; the epistemology of testimony; and pragmatic encroachment. The aim is a reorientation of epistemology, away from emphasising negative, restrictive norms, and towards positive ones. I aim to vindicate in a more serious way the natural thought that we often ought to believe things.