• Corpus ID: 43946220

Knowledge before belief : Response-times indicate evaluations of knowledge prior to belief

@inproceedings{Phillips2017KnowledgeBB,
  title={Knowledge before belief : Response-times indicate evaluations of knowledge prior to belief},
  author={Jonathan Scott Phillips and Joshua Knobe and Brent Strickland and Pauline Armary and Fiery Andrews Cushman},
  year={2017}
}

• J. Phillips, J. Knobe, +2 authors F. Cushman
• Published 2017
• Psychology

In a series of studies, we investigate the relationship between evaluations of knowledge and belief in human adult theory of mind, and provide evidence that evaluations of knowledge do not dependent on belief. Study 1 finds that people can accurately evaluate others’ knowledge before they can accurately evaluate their beliefs. Study 2 demonstrates that this pattern cannot be not explained by pragmatic differences. Study 3 illustrates that pattern occurs cross-linguistically and unlikely to be accounted for by differences in word frequency. Study 4 provides evidence that this difference in response times generalizes to the larger class of factive and non-factive attitudes (to which knowledge and belief respectively belong). Together, these studies demonstrate that in determining what others know, human adults do not first determine what they believe, and more generally lend support a view on which knowledge representations are a basic way in which we make sense of others’ minds.