Rethinking the design stance: A cognitivist perspective on the attribution of mind to robots and AI systems

The attribution of mental states to robots and AI systems has been explored through various frameworks, including Theory of Mind (ToM) and Dennett’s intentional systems theory (1971). A large number of studies aim to investigate whether people attribute intentionality to robots and AI systems, and under what conditions this phenomenon occurs. Empirical studies in HRI have typically considered the design stance (in Dennett’s framework) as a non-mentalistic stance, where explanations and predictions of the behavior of a system would not either implicitly or explicitly refer to the system's mind. This paper aims to develop the notion of design stance in a perspective that partially departs from the traditional view adopted by empirical studies in HRI. It will be argued that there are at least two different ways to outline the design stance: one non-mentalistic, the other, identified as the folk-cognitivist stance, which implies the attribution of a mental structure or mechanism to the system. In the framework proposed, theoretical models of the robots’ mind may be based on a theoretical vocabulary which does not rely on the notions of beliefs, desires, propositional attitudes and rationality and is more in line with that of cognitive science, taking the form of a functional decomposition of the system into modules that process representations. These claims will be substantiated by examples from ongoing empirical research.