Le scienze cognitive del senso comune

Our ability to 'read' other people’s minds and form theories about the structure and content of their mental states plays a fundamental role in social interaction. Mentalisation – the attribution of mental states to others – can also occur when we interact with technological devices such as robots and artificial intelligence systems. In partial contrast to the prevailing scientific literature on this phenomenon, we propose that in their ordinary interactions with robots, people may model the robot’s mind in ways that differ substantially from the so-called intentional stance, and adopt what we here call a "folk-cognitivist" stance. According to this view, people’s theorisation of the mind of robots can take the form of a functional decomposition of the system into cognitive modules that elaborate representations, in line with the models of mind that characterise classical cognitive science. In this article, we formulate and justify this idea, analyse the distinction between the intentional and folk-cognitivist stances, and discuss the ontological commitments of folk cognitivism.