The Intentional Stance Toward Robots: Conceptual and Methodological Considerations.

Abstract

It is well known that people tend to anthropomorphize in interpretationsand explanations of the behavior of robots and otherinteractive artifacts. Scientific discussions of this phenomenontend to confuse the overlapping notions of folk psychology,theory of mind, and the intentional stance. We provide a clarificationof the terminology, outline different research questions,and propose a methodology for making progress in studyingthe intentional stance toward robots empirically.