How do people know

To fully understand processes of knowing and knowledge acquisition, it is necessary to examine people’s understanding of their own know-ing. Individual and developmental differences in what it means to know something, and hence in the criteria for justifying knowledge claims, have potentially wide-ranging implications. In providing sup-port for a claim, young children have difficulty differentiating expla-nation of why a claim makes sense and evidence that the claim is true. Epistemic understanding progresses developmentally, but substantial variation remains among adults, with few adults achieving under-standing of the complementary strengths and weaknesses of evidence and explanation in argument. Epistemic understanding shapes intel-lectual values and hence the disposition (as opposed to competence) to exercise intellectual skills. Only its most advanced levels support a disposition to engage in the intellectual effort that reasoned argument entails. The sample case of juror reasoning illustrates how epistemi