Knowledge without belief

Five studies investigate the relationship between evaluations of knowledge and belief in theory of mind and demonstrate that evaluations of knowledge are made in the absence of evaluations of belief. Our studies find that (1) people can accurately evaluate others’ knowledge before they evaluate their beliefs, (2) this pattern extends to participants with Autism Spectrum Disorder and cannot be explained by pragmatic differences in knowledge and belief ascriptions, (3) it also occurs cross-linguistically and is not accounted for by differences in word frequency, (4) it generalizes to the larger class of factive and non-factive attitudes (to which knowledge and belief respectively belong), and using fMRI data, (5) that the neural response that occurs when making evaluations of others’ beliefs is absent when making similar evaluations of knowledge. Together, these studies demonstrate that human adults can attribute or deny knowledge states without first evaluating belief states. At a broad level, these findings suggest that knowledge representation is distinct from belief representation and offers a conceptually primitive way to represent others’ minds.