On a widely suggested knowledge-first account of belief, to believe p is to phi as if one knew p. I challenge this view by arguing against various regimentations of it. I conclude by generalizing my argument to alternative knowledge-first views suggested by Williamson and Wimmer.

I develop a challenge for a widely suggested knowledge-first account of belief that turns, primarily, on unknowable propositions. I consider and reject several responses to my challenge and sketch a new knowledge-first account of belief that avoids it.

How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled (...) from our own primary representation of reality; handling these contents has come to be seen as the signature of full-blown human mindreading. However, mindreading in cooperative communication does not necessarily demand decoupling. We argue for a theoretical and empirical turn towards “factive” forms of mentalizing here. In factive mentalizing, we monitor what others do or do not know, without generating decoupled representations. We propose a model of the representational, cognitive, and interactive components of factive mentalizing, a model that aims to explain efficient real-time monitoring of epistemic states in conversation. After laying out this account, we articulate a more limited set of conversational functions for nonfactive forms of mentalizing, including contexts of meta-linguistic repair, deception, and argumentation. We conclude with suggestions for further research into the roles played by factive versus nonfactive forms of mentalizing in conversation. (shrink)

Recklessness involves unreasonable/unjustified risk-taking. The argument here is that recklessness in the criminal law is best understood as nevertheless containing an element of reasonableness. To be reckless, on this view, the defendant must reasonably believe that she is exposing others to a risk of harm. If the defendant’s belief about the risk being imposed by her conduct is unreasonable, she should not be considered reckless. This point is most important in relation to offences of endangerment where recklessness sets the outer (...) limits of criminal liability. (shrink)

Orthodox epistemology tells us that knowledge requires belief. While there has been resistance to orthodoxy on this point, the orthodox position has been ably defended and continues to be widely endorsed. In what follows I aim to undermine the belief requirement on knowledge. I first show that awareness does not require belief. Next I turn my attention to the relation between knowledge and awareness, showing that awareness entails knowledge and thus that the cases of awareness without belief that I discuss (...) are also cases of knowledge without belief. Throughout I draw attention to the fact that these are not isolated cases, and that beliefless knowledge is a rather common phenomenon. I conclude by arguing that beliefless knowledge is consistent with the idea that all knowledge is grounded in belief and the idea that knowledge is essentially a representational state. (shrink)

I put forward an externalist theory of social understanding. On this view, psychological sense making takes place in environments that contain both agent and interpreter. The spatial structure of such environments is social, in the sense that its occupants locate its objects by an exercise in triangulation relative to each of their standpoints. This triangulation is achieved in intersubjective interaction and gives rise to a triadic model of the social mind. This model can then be used to make sense of (...) others’ observed actions. Its possession plays a vital role in the development of the capacity for false belief reasoning. The view offers an integrated account of the development of social cognition from primary intersubjectivity to level-2 perspective taking. It incorporates insights from interactionism and mindreading theories of social cognition and thus offers a way out of the stalemate between defenders of the two views. Because psychological sense making is perspectival, the frame problem does not arise for social reasoners: the perspective they bring to bear on the action that is to be interpreted constrains the information they can select to make sense of what others do. (shrink)

I put forward an externalist theory of social understanding. On this view, psychological sense making takes place in environments that contain both agent and interpreter. The spatial structure of such environments is social, in the sense that its occupants locate its objects by an exercise in triangulation relative to each of their standpoints. This triangulation is achieved in intersubjective interaction and gives rise to a triadic model of the social mind. This model can then be used to make sense of (...) others’ observed actions. Its possession plays a vital role in the development of the capacity for false belief reasoning. The view offers an integrated account of the development of social cognition from primary intersubjectivity to level-2 perspective taking. It incorporates insights from interactionism and mindreading theories of social cognition and thus offers a way out of the stalemate between defenders of the two views. Because psychological sense making is perspectival, the frame problem does not arise for social reasoners: the perspective they bring to bear on the action that is to be interpreted constrains the information they can select to make sense of what others do. (shrink)

This book review sketches the main arguments of Findlay Stark’s book, and then goes on to develop an objection to Stark’s account of one of the core notions in the book—namely, awareness of risk.

ABSTRACT A number of authors have recently advanced a ‘disjunctivist’ view of the rationalising explanation of action, on which rationalisations of the form ‘S A’d because p’ are explanations of a fundamentally different kind from rationalisations of the form ‘S A’d because she believed that p’. Less attempt has been made to explicitly articulate the case against this view. This paper seeks to remedy that situation. I develop a detailed version of what I take to be the basic argument against (...) disjunctivism, drawing on a framework of explanatory proportionality. The disjunctivist cannot reject this framework, I argue, because they need it to respond to another challenge, from psychological individualism. As I explain, however, the proportionality-based challenge is not in principle insurmountable, and I outline a number of ways in which a case for disjunctivism might be developed in response to it. The paper thus clarifies the dialectic around disjunctivism about the rationalisation of action and, specifically, what advocates of the view must do in order to make a compelling case for it. (shrink)

This idea that what is distinctive of intentional performances (or at least of those intentional performances that amount to skilled actions) is one’s practical knowledge in it —i.e., knowledge of what one is doing while doing it— famously traces back to Anscombe ([]1963] 2000). While many philosophers have theorized about Anscombe’s notion of practical knowledge (e.g., Setiya (2008), Thompson et al. (2011), Schwenkler (2019), O’Brien (2007)), there is a wide disagreement about how to understand it. This paper investigates how best (...) to understand practical knowledge for it to play the desired explanatory role in a reductive theory of intentional action, of intention-in-action, and of control-in-action. I argue that practical knowledge ought to be construed as a dynamic knowledge state and that structured practical senses (Pavese 2015) are needed to model it. (shrink)

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, (...) we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibits a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind – one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it. (shrink)

This paper reexamines the case for mentality — the thesis that knowledge is a mental state in its own right, and not only derivatively, simply by virtue of being composed out of mental states or by virtue of being a property of mental states — and explores a novel argument for it. I argue that a certain property singled out by psychologists and philosophers of cognitive science as distinctive of skillful behavior (agentive control) is best understood in terms of knowledge. (...) While psychological theories of agentive control that appeal to monitoring mechanisms, such as attention, have been proposed, these theories cannot account for the full scope of controlled action. By contrast, I argue that an epistemic theory of agentive control that invokes knowledge is extensionally adequate. It is when it comes to understanding the hallmarks of skillful performance that the theoretical benefits of thinking of knowledge as mental can be fully appreciated. (shrink)

Recently, a view I refer to as “hypothetical continuism” has garnered some favour among philosophers, based largely on empirical research showing substantial neurocognitive overlaps between episodic memory and imagination. According to this view, episodically remembering past events is the same kind of cognitive process as sensorily imagining future and counterfactual events. In this paper, I first argue that hypothetical continuism is false, on the basis of substantive epistemic asymmetries between episodic memory and the relevant kinds of imagination. However, I then (...) propose and defend an alternative form of continuism, according to which episodic memory is continuous with a capacity I call “actuality-oriented imagination.” Because of the deep epistemic affinities between episodic memory and actuality-oriented imagination, it makes sense to think of them as cognitive processes of the same kind. (shrink)

On an ‘internalist’ picture, knowledge isn’t necessary for understanding the nature of perception and perceptual experience. This contrasts with the ‘knowledge first’ picture, according to which it’s essential to the nature of successful perceiving as a mental state that it’s a way of knowing. It’s often thought that naturalistic theorizing about the mind should adopt the internalist picture. However, I argue that a powerful, recently prominent framework for scientific study of the mind, ‘predictive processing,’ instead supports the knowledge first picture. (...) Under predictive processing, it’s intrinsic to successful perceiving that it’s a state with the kind of modal robustness that’s distinctive of knowledge, which gives us reason to think of successful perceiving along knowledge first lines. Furthermore, I argue that the predictive processing framework encourages us to conceptualize experiences which don’t amount to knowledge along knowledge first lines, as states which by their nature fall short of knowledge. (shrink)

The aim of the present article is to accomplish two things. The first is to show that given some further plausible assumptions, existing challenges to the indispensability of knowledge in causal explanation of action fail. The second is to elaborate an overlooked and distinct argument in favor of the causal efficacy of knowledge. In short, even if knowledge were dispensable in causal explanation of action, it is still indispensable in causal explanation of other mental attitudes and, in particular, some reactive (...) attitudes and factive emotions. Taking into account this sort of causal efficacy in determining which mental states are genuine mental states opens up new perspectives for defending the view that knowledge is the most general factive and genuine mental state. (shrink)

The aim of the present article is to accomplish two things. The first is to show that given some further plausible assumptions, existing challenges to the indispensability of knowledge in causal explanation of action fail. The second is to elaborate an overlooked and distinct argument in favor of the causal efficacy of knowledge. In short, even if knowledge were dispensable in causal explanation of action, it is still indispensable in causal explanation of other mental attitudes and, in particular, some reactive (...) attitudes and factive emotions. Taking into account this sort of causal efficacy in determining which mental states are genuine mental states opens up new perspectives for defending the view that knowledge is the most general factive and genuine mental state. (shrink)

We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in (...) their "armchairs of an afternoon", to use J.L. Austin’s phrase. Third, we discuss facts about the meaning of "know" that so far have been ignored in philosophy, with the aim of reorienting discussions of the relevance of ordinary language for philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

Theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to ourselves and others, is crucial for human social interaction and has been argued to fully develop around the age of 4. However, recent research suggests that children can perform rudimentary, preverbal ToM inferences at an earlier age, indicating a discrepancy between this early, implicit ToM and a later mastery of explicit ToM tasks. Already in the second year of life children show competence in grasping what an agent knows and does (...) not know in preverbal communication, whereas explicit performance on ToM tasks can only be observed around the age of 4. One possible explanation is that children require an additional representational resource in order to be able to associate their preverbal understanding with explicit terms that can be used to denote it in standard ToM tasks. The purpose of this thesis is to extend research on ToM in the third year of life by investigating one possible representational resource, namely mental state language. Mental state language is considered crucial for ToM development as it is the first explicit means by which children can verbalize mental states and it plays an important role for both precursors and subsequent mastery of explicit ToM tasks. However, how exactly mental state language production reflects children's awareness and comprehension of mental states remains understudied. Harris, Yang, and Cui have argued that children use mental state terms early on and possess basic representations of their own knowledge and ignorance. Since both mental state terms and basic representations appear to be present at the same time, one might assume that children already possess associations between them. However, experimental tasks that investigate mental state verbs like `know' and `think' are only able to find competence to differentiate between them around the age of 5. Thus, the extent to which the appropriate use of mental state terms in conversation reflects comprehension of the denoted mental states remains unclear. Given that mental state language develops around the second and third year of life, one may gain insight into the role it plays for a transition from implicit to explicit competence by investigating abilities which, according to our current understanding, develop around the same time and show both preverbal and verbal aspects. Perspective-taking and implicit false-belief understanding are such abilities. Children show early preverbal perspective-taking competence at the age of 24 months, but only develop verbal perspective-taking competence around the age of 3. Previous work has identified a relationship between mental state language and verbal perspective-taking at the age of 30 months, but no study has investigated this relationship in connection to preverbal perspective-taking. Also in the area of falsebelief understanding studies have mostly investigated the relationship between mental state language and explicit false-belief tasks, but no study has examined how mental state language may relate to an implicit false-belief task. Finally, mental state language has been found to correlate with a number of different competencies, among them inhibitory control and general language, but no study has systematically investigated which of these competencies serve as precursors that predict children's later mental state language production. Determining precursors is relevant for understanding crucial aspects of mental state language development and how it might relate to children's preverbal representations of mental states. The aims of the present thesis were thus to investigate the relationship between children's mental state language production and their comprehension of mental state terms and mental states, to determine the role that mental state language production may play in preverbal and verbal perspective-taking and implicit false-belief understanding and finally, to identify the basic linguistic and cognitive skills that contribute to the development of mental state language. These aims were pursued through 2 studies. In study 1, children were assessed at two time-points. Once they were tested at the age of 24 months with measures of general language, cognitive and motoric development and inhibition skills. An additional time they were tested at 27 months in order to assess children's mental state language production, their preverbal and verbal perspective-taking skills, meta-cognitive awareness of ignorance, implicit false-belief understanding and finally a task that measured their ability to infer a speaker's need for information from a statement about knowing or not knowing the location of an item and a speaker's desire for an object from statements about wanting or not wanting a particular object. The aim was to determine the concurrent relationship of children's mental state language production and their ability to comprehend and use these terms on experimental tasks, to identify the concurrent relationship between mental state language and preverbal and verbal perspective-taking and implicit false-belief understanding and finally to determine which developmental skills at the age of 24 months are significant predictors of children's later mental state language production. Study 1 showed that 27-month-olds were already able to produce mental state terms and showed a basic understanding of their own knowledge and ignorance, but failed to show comprehension of epistemic mental state terms in experimental tasks. Thus, despite their early competence in producing epistemic mental state terms, children's comprehension of these terms appeared to be limited. The results of the first study also identified that mental state language production was related to children's own verbal level-1 visual perspective-taking, in particular to usage of the verb `know/don't know' in several naturalistic contexts, independent of general language. There was also continuity from children's preverbal understanding of perspectives to their ability to report their own perspective in a verbal task. However, there was no relationship between preverbal understanding of perspectives and mental state language production according to a parental questionnaire, suggesting that early preverbal understanding of perspectives is not related to the mere production of mental state terms unless children already produce these terms in appropriate contexts. In relation to implicit false-belief understanding, children's performance suggested that they followed a simple strategy of looking at the last object location instead of demonstrating false-belief understanding. Finally, study 1 also identified sentence production, inhibition and fine motor skills at 24 months as significant predictors of children's later production of mental state language at 27 months. In study 2, children's ability to infer a speaker's need for information was investigated further by administering a pragmatic inference task from study 1 to 2-, 3- and 5-year-olds and determining at which age children showed competence. Study 2 showed that despite being able to draw the right pragmatic inferences for the mental state verb `want' at the age of 2, only at the age of 5 children were able to draw the right pragmatic inferences for the mental state verb `know/don't know'. The overall results of this thesis implied that the crucial aspect of mental state language is not mere production of the verbs, but children's experience with a variety of contexts in which mental state verbs can be used, corresponding with a socioconstructivist approach to cognitive development. The number of naturalistic contexts related to children's metarepresentations of their own ignorance, to their ability of inferring a speaker's desire and their ability to verbalize their own perspective, thus suggesting that the conversational input children receive is one of the main ways in which mental representations become explicit. Furthermore, the theoretical view that children's preverbal competence may be better explained by a production rule approach instead of early conceptual understanding is discussed. (shrink)