Gettier intuitions are robust in children and adults

It has long been debated in Theory of Mind research and epistemology what the primary cognitive attitude in our folk psychology is: belief or knowledge? In contrast to traditional “Belief First” accounts, recent “Knowledge First” epistemology and “Factive Theory of Mind” accounts consider knowledge ascription basic, primary and not reducible to, or derived from, belief ascription. So-called Gettier cases play an important role in this debate: Cases where an agent has justified true beliefs that we are intuitively hesitant, however, to consider knowledge. In the present studies, we tested how robust such Gettier intuitions (an agent has a justified true belief that p but falls short of knowing that p) are in adults under stringently controlled conditions; and we implement the first developmental test of these intuitions in children (5-8 years). Across three studies participants saw novel video-based vignettes that were modelled after standard change-of-location False Belief tasks. In different conditions, an agent had True Belief )full access( about the location of an object, a false belief, or a Gettier-case true belief. Results revealed that Gettier intuitions proved to be robust in both adults and children: they virtually always ascribed knowledge in the True Belief condition, and virtually never in the False Belief condition; in the Gettier cases, they ascribed knowledge sometimes, but much less so than in the True Belief condition. In addition, when asked to predict what the agent in the vignette would do (where they would search for the target object), adults did revert to belief ascription in all conditions but were slower and less certain in the Gettier conditions. Taking together, these findings constitute evidence in support of Knowledge First or Factive Theory of Mind accounts.