An emerging trend in cognitive science is to explore central epistemological questions using psychological methods. Early work in this growing area of research has revealed that epistemologists’ theories of knowledge diverge in various ways from the ways in which ordinary people think of knowledge. Reflecting the practices of epistemology as a whole, the vast majority of these studies have focu...

This study examined pre-school children's understanding of the concept of cancer and their parent's perceptions of their child's understanding of cancer. Parents completed a questionnaire and pre-school children were administered an interview. The results showed that when children indicated that they knew something about cancer, their responses associated cancer with something medical, bad or h...

Metacognitive abilities, such as knowing we know something or that we made the wrong decision, can be powerful tools for adapting behaviour and accelerating learning. Apes, dolphins, and even rats demonstrate some such abilities; a new study provides evidence that human infants can too.

Millar has written a valuable monograph on perceptual knowledge. Knowing By Perceiving is careful and detailed, at times laborious, delivering many insights. Occasionally S sees an F, there’s bit of Ψing Φing, but the examples have pleasantly bucolic feel: wheelbarrows full soil, evening sunlight hillside, mushrooms rotting logs, frost grass, ‘an island where there are sheep that make distincti...

We propose a formalization of only-knowing-about, which captures the idea that something is all an agent knows about some subject matter. The work extends a previous formalization of only-knowing by Levesque. Besides discussing some of the logical properties of the new concept, we also address the issue of computing what is known about some subject matter for a given knowledge base. In this con...

Many philosophers believe that there is a fundamental distinction between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to do something. According to Gilbert Ryle, to whom the insight is credited, knowledge-how is an ability, which is in turn a complex of dispositions. Knowledge-that, on the other hand, is not an ability, or anything similar. Rather, knowledge-that is a relation between a ...

mentalistic property attributed to others. Is intentional understanding limited to the immediate perception of attentional behaviours? I will review evidence suggesting that in some primates intentional understanding may extend to coding some epistemic states similar to "knowing" and "not knowing". For example, chimpanzees and orangutans code whether others did or did not see potential targets ...