Social Robots and Social Interaction

Abstract

I study the implications of the use of social robotics to our concepts of social interaction in everyday usage and in philosophical theories of social action. If people sometimes conceive their activities with robots as cases of social interaction even though they do not attribute to robots all the capacities that philosophers take to be necessary requirements for participating in social interaction, these requirements may need to be reconsidered. For instance, some analyses of social interaction require that the parties of interaction are jointly committed in the activity in question in ways that involve obligations. However, such normative concepts as commitments and obligations may not be attributable to robots, but people may still conceive themselves as being involved in social interaction with them. If this is the case, there is a tension between how social interaction is understood in everyday contexts and how it is analysed in philosophy. I study different ways to understand this tension in terms of alternative methodological orientations towards conceptual analysis of social interaction.