Why is knowledge faster than ( true ) belief ? BBS Commentary on “ Knowledge before belief

Phillips and colleagues convincingly argue that knowledge attribution is a faster, more automatic form of mindreading than belief attribution. However, they do not explain what it is about knowledge attribution that lends it this cognitive advantage. I suggest an explanation of the knowledgeattribution advantage that would also help to distinguish it from belief-based and minimalist alternatives. One of the key claims of the target article is that reasoning about states of knowledge is faster and more automatic than reasoning about states of belief. While Phillips and colleagues provide a range of evidence to support this claim, they do not explain what it is about knowledge attribution that makes it more efficient than belief attribution. Filling in these details will be crucial to explaining how knowledge attribution actually works and would also help to distinguish the proposed framework from nearby alternatives. One way for the authors to explain the knowledge-attribution advantage would be to adopt a minimalist approach, and suggest that knowledge-based mindreading deploys representations of non-propositional relations that hold between agents and states of affairs – something analogous to Burge’s notion of sensing (Burge, 2018) or Butterfill and Apperly’s notion of a registration (Butterfill & Apperly, 2013). However, as proponents of these minimalist models have been careful to point out, this kind of mindreading does not actually enable agents to reason about propositional attitudes; rather, they enable agents to track mental states like belief without representing them as such. Since knowledge is also a propositional attitude, this means that minimal mindreading could not support genuine knowledge attribution. At most, it would enable an agent to extensionally track factive states without representing them as knowledge. If the account described in the target article aims for more than this, then a minimalist approach will not do. A better approach to explaining the knowledge-attribution advantage would be to start by looking at the processing demands stemming false-belief attribution, the paradigmatic example of propositional attitude reasoning. Famously, false-belief attribution requires mindreaders to generate and maintain two mutually inconsistent, decoupled representations of the world, which places inherent demands executive functions like working memory and inhibitory control (Fizke et al., 2014; Schuwerk et al., 2014). If knowledge attribution involved a similar decoupling process, albeit one where the attributed representation is consistent with the mindreader’s own primary, first-personal representation, then this might explain the knowledge-attribution advantage: while it involves the attribution of full-blown propositional attitudes, the contents of knowledge attributions do not conflict with the way the mindreader sees the world, which places fewer demands on their executive resources. However, this picture sounds perilously close to how one might describe true-belief attribution. If the knowledgeattribution advantage were due solely to this consistency in attributed contents, then it would seem that the entire model could be easily redescribed in non-factive, doxastic terms without any real loss in explanatory power.