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Given the significant exculpatory power that ignorance has when it comes to moral, legal, and epistemic transgressions, it is important to have an accurate understanding of the concept of ignorance. According to the Standard View of factual ignorance, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not know that p, while on the New View, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not truly believe that p. On their own though, neither of these accounts explains how ignorance can often be a degreed notion—how we can sometimes be slightly ignorant, quite ignorant, or completely ignorant that p. In this paper, I will argue that there is a route for advocates of the Standard View and the New View to accommodate the gradability of ignorance. On the view I defend, 'ignorant' picks out everyone that is ignorant to some degree, making it possible that ignorance can be both degreed and characterized as a lack of knowledge or true belief. Even though we can be ignorant to a greater or lesser extent, the only way to avoid being ignorant that p is to know or truly believe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to understand the mental states of others has sometimes been attributed to a domain‐specific mechanism which privileges the processing of these states over similar but nonmental representations. If correct, then others' beliefs should be processed more efficiently than similar information contained within nonmental states. We tested this by examining whether adults would be faster to process others' false beliefs than equivalent "false" photos. Additionally, we tested whether they would be faster to process others' true beliefs about something than their own (matched) personal knowledge about the same event. Across four experiments, we found a small but reliable effect in favor of the first prediction, but no evidence for the second. Results are consistent with accounts positing specialized processes for (false) mental states. The size of the effect does, however, suggest that alternative explanations such as practice effects cannot be ruled out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper makes two points. First, any theory of knowledge must explain the difference between cases of knowledge from falsehood (provided there are any) and Gettier cases where the subject relies on reasoning from falsehood. Second, the closeness-to-the-truth approach to explaining the difference between knowledge-yielding and knowledge-suppressing falsehoods does not hold up to scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his outstanding book Knowledge and its Limits (2000), Williamson (a) claims that we have inductive evidence for some negative theses concerning the prospects of defining knowledge, like this: knowing cannot be defined in accordance with a determinate traditional conjunctive scheme; (b) defends a theory of mental states, mental concepts and the relations between the two, from which we would obtain additional, not merely inductive, evidence for this negative thesis; and (c) presents an alternative (non-traditional-conjunctive) definition of knowledge. Here I consider these issues and extract two relevant conclusions: (i) Williamson's theory of states and concepts only supports the negative thesis because this theory would explain too much, since it imposes implausible necessary limitations on possible uses of concepts and linguistic expressions. So, there is no appropriate non-inductive evidence for the negative thesis. (ii) Williamson's own definition of knowledge is at risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The litmus test for the development of a metarepresentational Theory of Mind is the false belief (FB) task in which children have to represent how another agent misrepresents the world. Children typically start mastering this task around age four. Recently, however, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. Pragmatic accounts assume that the TB task is pragmatically confusing because it poses a trivial academic test question about a rational agent’s perspective; and we do not normally engage in such discourse about subjective mental perspectives unless there is at least the possibility of error or deviance. The lack of such an obvious possibility in the TB task implicates that there might be some hidden perspective difference and thus makes the task confusing. In the present study, we test the pragmatic account by administering to 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 88) TB and FB tasks and structurally analogous true and false sign (TS/FS) tasks. The belief and sign tasks are matched in terms of representational and metarepresentational complexity; the crucial difference is that TS tasks do not implicate an alternative non-mental perspective and should thus be less pragmatically confusing than TB tasks. The results show parallel and correlated development in FB and FS tasks, replicate the puzzling performance pattern in TB tasks, but show no trace of this in TS tasks. Taken together, these results speak in favor of the pragmatic performance account.

The litmus test for the development of a metarepresentational Theory of Mind is the false belief (FB) task in which children have to represent how another agent misrepresents the world. Children typically start mastering this task around age four. Recently, however, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. Pragmatic accounts assume that the TB task is pragmatically confusing because it poses a trivial academic test question about a rational agent's perspective; and we do not normally engage in such discourse about subjective mental perspectives unless there is at least the possibility of error or deviance. The lack of such an obvious possibility in the TB task implicates that there might be some hidden perspective difference and thus makes the task confusing. In the present study, we test the pragmatic account by administering to 3- to 6-year-olds (N = 88) TB and FB tasks and structurally analogous true and false sign (TS/FS) tasks. The belief and sign tasks are matched in terms of representational and metarepresentational complexity; the crucial difference is that TS tasks do not implicate an alternative non-mental perspective and should thus be less pragmatically confusing than TB tasks. The results show parallel and correlated development in FB and FS tasks, replicate the puzzling performance pattern in TB tasks, but show no trace of this in TS tasks. Taken together, these results speak in favor of the pragmatic performance account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the Meno , Socrates suggests that genuine virtue is knowledge. This is surprising because he has recently concluded that virtue is (mere) true opinion. I show that Socrates' new position is motivated by two commitments. First, that being virtuous requires being responsible for the correctness of one's actions. Second, that only a knower has this kind of ownership of action. An implication of my argument is that, despite his emphasis on virtuous action in the Meno , Socrates endorses an agent -centred ethics. He thinks the epistemic status of the agent is essential to the assessment of her goodness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that infants possess a rich, sophisticated theory of mind (ToM) that is only revealed with tasks based on spontaneous responses. A mature (ToM) implies the understanding that mental states are person specific. Previous studies on infants’ understanding of motivational mental states, such as goals and preferences have revealed that, by 9 months of age, infants do not generalize these motivational mental states across agents. However, it remains to be determined if infants also perceive epistemic states as person specific. Therefore, the goal of the present study was to use a switch agent paradigm with the classic false belief violation-of-expectation task. Results revealed that 16-month-old infants attributed true and false beliefs to a naïve agent – they did not perceive beliefs as person specific. These findings indicate that the mechanisms that underlie infants’ implicit attribution of beliefs differ from those assumed for explicit reasoning about beliefs.

The issue of "error", along with the subject of knowledge, is very important for Plato and in the context of defining knowledge as the right belief in Theaetetus, it seeks to explain the possibility of mistaken belief. He offers suggestions to explain the issue of error beliefs. He offers two proposals, one based on the concepts of knowing and not-knowing, and the other based on the concepts of being and not-being, puts two puzzles to believe in error, and both of these are two puzzles to believe in error. Then, he presents three solutions to false belief. Each of these suggestions is carefully reviewed. But all the ways will remain in vain and the efforts are fruitless. Here, Plato seeks to show that the mere reliance on detail as what true knowledge belongs to it, leads to the impossibility of explaining false belief. In this paper, different aspects of the issue of error belief are analyzed to reach Plato's views in the Theaetetus treatise.

We often think or say that someone was wrong about something but almost right about it or close to the truth. This can mean more than one thing. Here, I propose an analysis of the idea of being epistemically close to the truth. This idea plays an important role in our practice of epistemic evaluation and therefore deserves some detailed attention. I start (section1) with an exposition of the idea of getting things right by looking at the main forms of reliabilism about true belief and belief acquisition. The focus on reliabilism is justified because (almost) everyone is a reliabilist in a basic sense. Section 2 develops a notion of closeness to the truth in two steps. Section 3 mentions some ways in which this notion is useful, one having to do with the Gettier problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that infants possess a rich, sophisticated theory of mind (ToM) that is only revealed with tasks based on spontaneous responses. A mature (ToM) implies the understanding that mental states are person specific. Previous studies on infants' understanding of motivational mental states, such as goals and preferences have revealed that, by 9 months of age, infants do not generalize these motivational mental states across agents. However, it remains to be determined if infants also perceive epistemic states as person specific. Therefore, the goal of the present study was to use a switch agent paradigm with the classic false belief violation-of-expectation task. Results revealed that 16-month-old infants attributed true and false beliefs to a naïve agent – they did not perceive beliefs as person specific. These findings indicate that the mechanisms that underlie infants' implicit attribution of beliefs differ from those assumed for explicit reasoning about beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]