Knowledge before belief in the history of philosophy

I add support to Phillips et al.'s thesis that representations of knowledge are more basic than representations of belief through a historical account of the development of philosophical theories of knowledge and belief. On the basis of Aristotle's criticisms of his Presocratic predecessors, I argue that Western philosophy developed theories of knowledge long before it developed theories of belief.

Knowledge before Belief

Research on the capacity to understand others’ minds has tended to focus on representations of beliefs, which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations of knowledge, 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 doesn't 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 non-human 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 exhibit 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.

Probabilistic Representations of Belief

Formal epistemology is epistemology that uses mathematical tools. Foremost among them is probability theory. We can represent the strength of a belief by assigning it a number between zero and one, with one representing belief with maximal strength, and zero with minimal strength. Using these, and other, formal tools, we can investigate a range of epistemological questions, such as: What justifies beliefs? How should evidence inform belief? How should we update our beliefs over time?

Mystic Island

Throughout the Philippines, Siquijor is infamous as a realm of sorcery, witchcraft and hyperactive paranormal activity. At the same time, the island is promoted as an unspoiled haven of white beaches and undulating palms. Both caricatures position Siquijor as an isolated place, eluded by progress. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Siquijodnon are Christian—a religion with which official public performances of development are closely aligned in much of the Philippines. The chapter explores the symbolic associations between belief and development, and the ways in which people on Siquijor negotiate social categories of modernization through representations of belief. It is argued that as Siquijodnon attempt to challenge nationally dominant stereotypes of themselves as backward, the often reinforce the very framework that has defined them as backwards.

The semantics and pragmatics of belief reports in preschoolers

<p class="p1"><span style="font-size: 10px;">Children under 4 years have been claimed to lack adult-like semantic representations of belief verbs like ‘think’. Based on two experiments involving a truth-value judgment task, we argue that 4-year olds’ apparently deviant interpretations arise from pragmatic difficulty understanding the </span><em style="font-size: 10px;">relevance </em><span style="font-size: 10px;">of belief, rather than from conceptual or semantic immaturity. </span></p>

PARTIAL PROBABILITY: THEORY AND APPLICATIONS

In this paper, we describe an approach to handling partially specified probabilistic information. We propose a formalism, called Partial Probability Theory (PPT), which allows very general representations of belief states, and we give brief treatments of problems, like belief change, evidence combination, and decision making in the context of PPT. We argue that the generality of PPT provide new insights in all the mentioned problem areas. More detailed treatments of these issues can be found in several papers referred to in the text.