Cognition and Affect: Architectures and Tools

Abstract

Which agent architectures are capable of justifying descriptions in terms of the `higher level' mental concepts applicable to human beings? We propose a new kind of architecturebased semantics for mentalistic descriptions in which mental concepts (e.g. `believes', `desires', `intends', `mood', `emotion ', etc.) are grounded in assumptions about information processing architectures, and not merely in concepts based solely on Dennett's `intentional stance'. These ideas have led to the design of the SIM AGENT toolkit which has been used to explore a variety of such architectures. 1 Architectures and mentalistic descriptions McCarthy [1] gives reasons why we shall need to describe intelligent robots in mentalistic terms, and why such a robot will need some degree of self consciousness. He also proposes a notation that we and the robot might use to describe its states. We extend that work by focusing on the underlying `high level' architectures required to justify ascriptions of mentality...