Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T17:02:24.409Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ignorance matters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2021

Amanda Royka Open the ORCID record for Amanda Royka [Opens in a new window]  and
Julian Jara-Ettinger
Amanda Royka
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT06520-8205, USA. amanda.royka@yale.edu; julian.jara-ettinger@yale.edu; https://compdevlab.yale.edu/
Julian Jara-Ettinger
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT06520-8205, USA. amanda.royka@yale.edu; julian.jara-ettinger@yale.edu; https://compdevlab.yale.edu/
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The ability to reason about ignorance is an important and often overlooked representational capacity. Phillips and colleagues assume that knowledge representations are inevitably accompanied by ignorance representations. We argue that this is not necessarily the case, as agents who can reason about knowledge often fail on ignorance tasks, suggesting that ignorance should be studied as a separate representational capacity.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 44 , 2021 , e167
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Birch, S. A., & Bloom, P. (2003). Children are cursed: An asymmetric bias in mental-state attribution. Psychological Science, 14(3), 283–286.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Call, J., & Carpenter, M. (2001). Do apes and children know what they have seen? Animal Cognition, 3(4), 207–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drayton, L. A., & Santos, L. R. (2018). What do monkeys know about others’ knowledge? Cognition, 170, 201–208.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feiman, R., Mody, S., Sanborn, S., & Carey, S. (2017). What do you mean, no? Toddlers’ comprehension of logical “no” and “not.” Language Learning and Development, 13(4), 430–450.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flombaum, J. I., & Santos, L. R. (2005). Rhesus monkeys attribute perceptions to others. Current Biology, 15(5), 447–452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, O., & Petrashek, A. R. (2009). Children do not follow the rule “ignorance means getting it wrong.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102(1), 114–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamlin, K. J., Ullman, T., Tenenbaum, J., Goodman, N., & Baker, C. (2013). The mentalistic basis of core social cognition: Experiments in preverbal infants and a computational model. Developmental Science, 16(2), 209–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hare, B., Call, J., Agnetta, B., & Tomasello, M. (2000). Chimpanzees know what conspecifics do and do not see. Animal Behaviour, 59(4), 771–785.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hogrefe, G. J., Wimmer, H., & Perner, J. (1986). Ignorance versus false belief: A developmental lag in attribution of epistemic states. Child Development, 57(3), 567–582.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horschler, D. J., Santos, L. R., & MacLean, E. L. (2019). Do non-human primates really represent others’ ignorance? A test of the awareness relations hypothesis. Cognition, 190, 72–80.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Huang, Z., Hu, Q., & Shao, Y. (2019). Understanding others’ knowledge certainty from inference and information-seeking behaviors in children. Developmental Psychology, 55(7), 1372.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Karg, K., Schmelz, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2015a). The goggles experiment: Can chimpanzees use self-experience to infer what a competitor can see? Animal Behaviour, 105, 211–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karg, K., Schmelz, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2015b). Chimpanzees strategically manipulate what others can see. Animal Cognition, 18(5), 1069–1076.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koenig, M. A., & Echols, C. H. (2003). Infants’ understanding of false labeling events: The referential roles of words and the speakers who use them. Cognition, 87(3), 179–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luo, Y., & Johnson, S. C. (2009). Recognizing the role of perception in action at 6 months. Developmental Science, 12(1), 142–149.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marticorena, D. C., Ruiz, A. M., Mukerji, C., Goddu, A., & Santos, L. R. (2011). Monkeys represent others’ knowledge but not their beliefs. Developmental Science, 14(6), 1406–1416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, A., & Santos, L. R. (2016). What cognitive representations support primate theory of mind? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(5), 375–382.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mody, S., & Carey, S. (2016). The emergence of reasoning by the disjunctive syllogism in early childhood. Cognition, 154, 40–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mossler, D. G., Marvin, R. S., & Greenberg, M. T. (1976). Conceptual perspective taking in 2-to 6-year-old children. Developmental Psychology, 12(1), 85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nordmeyer, A. E., & Frank, M. C. (2014). The role of context in young children's comprehension of negation. Journal of Memory and Language, 77, 25–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Neill, D. K. (1996). Two-year-old children's sensitivity to a parent's knowledge state when making requests. Child Development, 67(2), 659–677.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reuter, T., Feiman, R., & Snedeker, J. (2018). Getting to no: Pragmatic and semantic factors in two- and three-year-olds’ understanding of negation. Child Development, 89(4), e364–e381.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ruffman, T. (1996). Do children understand the mind by means of simulation or a theory? Evidence from their understanding of inference. Mind & Language, 11(4), 388–414.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sullivan, K., & Winner, E. (1991). When 3-year-olds understand ignorance, false belief and representational change. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9(1), 159–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wellman, H. M., & Liu, D. (2004). Scaling of theory-of-mind tasks. Child Development, 75(2), 523–541.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed