On 30th March at 11:00 a.m. (Italian hour) a webinar of prof. Edoardo Datteri (University of Milano Bicocca) on “Folk-ontological stances toward robots” will take place on Teams (https://tinyurl.com/4ksd33dy) within the cycle of scientific webinars for the MD in Cognitive science and Theory of communication. All interested students and teachers are invited to participate.
Abstract: The study of people's understanding of robots is gaining momentum. A growing number of studies attempt to identify the circumstances in which people attribute mental states to robots and assess how mental state attributions modulate the dynamics of human-robot interaction. These empirical studies are substantially informed by Dennett's intentional system theory and by the so-called 'attribution theory' introduced by Friz Heider and later developed by Bertrand Malle. The first part of the seminar will be devoted to presenting this literature. The second part intends to suggest that research on mental state attribution to robots should take an "ontological turn". Scholars in the field focus on whether people treat robots *as if* they had mental states, ignoring their deep ontological commitments about the existence of robots' minds. Yet, people may take several kinds of folk-ontological stances towards robots, from forms of psychological realism (believing that robots have genuine mental states) to various forms of psychological fictionalism (e.g., pretend play). After presenting a tentative taxonomy, based on the philosophical debate on scientific realism in psychology, it will be suggested that the study of people's folk-ontological stances towards robots can be relevant to research on human-robot interaction.