Research on theory of mind has primarily focused on demonstrating and understanding the ability to represent others' non‐factive mental states, for example, others' beliefs in the false‐belief task. This requirement confuses the ability to represent a particular kind of non‐factive content (e.g., a false belief) with the more general capacity to represent others' understanding of the world even when it differs from one's own. We provide a way of correcting this. We first offer a simple and theoretically motivated account on (...) which tracking another agent's understanding of the world and keeping that representation separate from one's own are the essential features of a capacity for theory of mind. We then show how these criteria can be operationalized in a new experimental paradigm: the “diverse‐knowledge task.”. (shrink)

I investigate whether degreed beliefs are able to play the predictive, explanatory, and modeling roles that they are frequently taken to play. The investigation focuses on evidence—both from sources familiar in epistemology as well as recent work in behavioral economics and cognitive psychology—of variability in agents' apparent degrees of belief. Although such variability has been noticed before, there has been little philosophical discussion of its breadth or of the psychological mechanisms underlying it. Once these are appreciated, the inadequacy of degrees (...) of belief becomes clear. I offer a theoretical alternative to degrees of belief, what I call the filter theory. (shrink)

I criticize the idea that theories of ‘fragmented’ or ‘compartmentalized’ belief (as found in, e.g., Lewis 1982, Egan 2008) can help to account for the puzzling phenomena they are often taken to account for. After introducing fragmentationalism and a paradigm case that purportedly motivates it, I criticize the view primarily on the grounds that the models and explanations it offers are at best trivial—as witnessed by examples of over-generation—and should be seen as merely re-describing in figurative terms the phenomena it (...) is designed to account for. I also point out that fragments, as used in these theories, are not likely to be psychologically real in any robust sense and so cannot be appealed to on such grounds. (shrink)