Folk-Ontological Stances Towards Robots and Psychological Human Likeness

It has often been argued that people can attribute mental states to robots without making any ontological commitments to the reality of those states. But what does it mean to ‘attribute’ a mental state to a robot, and ‘to make an ontological commitment’ to it? It will be argued that, on a plausible interpretation of these two notions, it is not clear how mental state attribution can occur without making any ontological commitment. Taking inspiration from the philosophical debate on scientific realism, a provisional taxonomy of folk-ontological stances towards robots will also be identified, corresponding to different ways of understanding robots’ minds. They include realism, non-realism, eliminativism, reductionism, fictionalism and agnosticism. Instrumentalism will also be discussed and presented as a folk-epistemological stance. In the last part of the article it will be argued that people’s folk-ontological stances towards robots and humans can influence their perception of the human-likeness of robots. The analysis carried out here can be read as promoting a study of people’s inner beliefs about the reality of robots’ mental states during ordinary human-robot interaction.