Doubt is a temporal project spanning past motivation and future resolution

Evidence

But a suspension of judgment is not a doubt; it is only a necessary structure of doubt. In order for doubt to exist, it is necessary that this suspension be motivated by an insufficiency of reasons for affirming or for denying—which refers to the past—and that it be maintained deliberately until the intervention of new elements—which is already a project of the future. Doubt appears on the foundation of a pre-ontological comprehension of knowing and of requirements concerning truth. This comprehension and these requirements, which give all its meaning to doubt, engage the totality of human reality and its being in the world; they suppose the existence of an object of knowledge and of doubt—that is, of a transcendent permanence in universal time. It is then a related conduct which doubts the object, a conduct which represents one of the modes of the being-in-the-world of human reality. To discover oneself doubting is already to be ahead of oneself in the future, which conceals the end, the cessation, and the meaning of this doubt, and to be behind oneself in the past, which conceals the constituent motivations of the doubt and its stages of development, and to be outside of oneself in the world as presence to the object which one doubts. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 518

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sartre distinguishes genuine doubt from mere suspension of judgment — doubt requires temporal structure of prior motivation and future project.
• XREF: Directly relevant to Beauvoir’s treatment of ambiguity and to Descartes’ cogito that the reader is using as systematic backdrop.