Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate the relationship between evaluations of knowl-edge and belief in human adult theory of mind, and provideevidence that evaluations of knowledge are made without priorevaluations of belief. Our studies find that (1) people can ac-curately evaluate others’ knowledge before they evaluate theirbeliefs; (2) this pattern cannot be not explained by pragmaticdifferences; (3) it occurs cross-linguistically and unlikely tobe accounted for by differences in word frequency, and (4) italso generalizes to the larger class of factive and non-factiveattitudes (to which knowledge and belief respectively belong).Together, these studies demonstrate that human adults can as-cribe knowledge without first ascribing a belief state. Moregenerally, they lend support to the view that knowledge repre-sentations are a distinctive and basic way in which we makesense of others’ minds.