Mentalistic stances towards robots

Research on how people understand and explain the behavior of robots has often focused on the attribution of mental states to the system (Thellman et al., 2022 for a review), as in de Graaf and Malle (2019). A fundamental reference on whether and how people produce mentalistic explanations of the behavior of artificial agents is Dennett (1971, 1987). In Dennett’s framework, adopting the intentional stance towards a system consists in attributing to the system beliefs, desires, intentions and other propositional attitudes to explain and predict its behavior (Perez Osorio & Wykowska, 2020; Marchesi et al., 2019). In this work it is suggested that people may adopt an explanatory strategy that differs substantially from the intentional stance and is more in line with cognitivist accounts of mind. This explanatory and predictive style, which will be called here 'folk cognitivist', involves the functional decomposition of the robotic system in modules processing representations. This claim will be supported with reference to explanations of robotic behaviors acquired in the framework of a Braitenberg-style robo-ethological project carried out with children. It will be also claimed that the folk cognitivist stance cannot be simply equated with the design stance as defined by Dennett.