Folk-Ontological Stances Towards Robots and Psychological Human Likeness
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: It has often been argued that people can attribute mental states to robots without making any ontological commitments to the reality of those states. But what does it mean to ‘attribute’ a mental state to a robot, and ‘to make an ontological commitment’ to it? It will be argued that, on a plausible interpretation of these two notions, it is not clear how mental state attribution can occur without making any ontological commitment. Taking inspiration from the philosophical debate on scientific realism, a provisional taxonomy of folk-ontological stances towards robots will also be identified, corresponding to different ways of understanding robots’ minds. They include realism, non-realism, eliminativism, reductionism, fictionalism and agnosticism. Instrumentalism will also be discussed and presented as a folk-epistemological stance. In the last part of the article it will be argued that people’s folk-ontological stances towards robots and humans can influence their perception of the human-likeness of robots. The analysis carried out here can be read as promoting a study of people’s inner beliefs about the reality of robots’ mental states during ordinary human-robot interaction.
Author: Edoardo Datteri
Institution: University of Milano-Bicocca
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,190
OpenAlex ID: W4407980180