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I’m working on another paper on testimony, and I was drawn to this article on some of the empirical studies done on children and testimony. Something caught my eye that is completely unrelated to the topic of the paper. It’s another knowledge ascription. I like making note of knowledge ascriptions in wild. Here’s the one that came up in the above article.

Three-year-olds and even some four-year-olds are inclined to use the word ‘know’ to refer to someone whose actions are successful (for example, finds a given object) even if the person’s search is clearly based on a random guess between hiding places rather than having seen the object being hidden .

Take that, proponents of the view that justification is necessary for knowledge. Oh wait, I’m one of those proponents. So here is another ascription I need to say something about.

My favored option so far is that three and four year olds have quite zeroed in on the concept of knowledge yet. My guess is that this is the case with a lot of complex properties that are constituted by simpler properties. By the age of 3 and 4 they’ve figured out that having a true belief is pretty dang important, but that haven’t quite grasped that having a true belief isn’t good enough to have the good stuff that we call ‘knowledge’.

4 Responses to “Knowledge Ascriptions in the Wild: Children Using ‘Know’”

  1. Jonathan Ichikawa

    I’d like to see an example. The sentence as quoted can’t be literally true; ‘know’ never refers to people. I want to know what they say, and under what circumstances.

  2. Andrew Cullison

    Yeah. I’d like to see one too. It looks like the people who wrote this were being a bit sloppy (oh…and they’re not philosophers…this is from some cog sci literature that Sandy Goldberg cited).

    FWIW – I was assuming that when (a) someone found an object and (b) was clearly guessing – that 3-4 year old children were likely to say that, prior to finding the object, the subject knew where the object was.

  3. Jonathan Ichikawa

    Right, that’d be the interesting version of the data. But we’d still need to control for possibilities like not realizing that it was just a guess, or confusing the present with the past.

  4. Andrew Cullison

    Yeah. I was just thinking that. How do the experimenters know that, from the 3-4 year olds perspective, it’s “clearly a guess” as they say above.

    And, they must be asking the children after the discovery. Questions like: “Did the person know *before they found the object* where the object was?” are bound to be a bit confusing to a 3-4 year old. I’d like to know how that was controlled for.

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