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Tech Report kmi-98-02 Abstract


Seeing things as people: anthropomorphism and common-sense psychology
Techreport ID: kmi-98-02
Date: 1998
Author(s): Stuart Watt
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This thesis is about common-sense psychology and its role in cognitive science. Put simply, the argument is that common-sense psychology is important because it offers clues to some complex problems in cognitive science, and because common-sense psychology has significant effects on our intuitions, both in science and on an everyday level. The thesis develops a theory of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology. Anthropomorphism, the natural human tendency to ascribe human characteristics (and especially human mental characteristics) to things that aren't human, is an important theme in the thesis. Anthropomorphism reveals an endemic anthropocentricity that deeply influences our thinking about other minds. The thesis then constructs a descriptive model of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology, and uses it to analyse two studies of the ascription of mental states. The first, Baron-Cohen et al.'s (1985) false belief test, shows how cognitive modelling can be used to compare different theories of common-sense psychology. The second study, Searle's (1980) 'Chinese Room', shows that this same model can reproduce the patterns of scientific intuitions taken to systems which pass the Turing test (Turing, 1950), suggesting that it is best seen as a common-sense test for a mind, not a scientific one. Finally, the thesis argues that scientific theories involving the ascription of mentality through a model or a metaphor are partly dependent on each individual scientist's common-sense psychology. To conclude, this thesis develops an interdisciplinary study of common-sense psychology and shows that its effects are more wide ranging than is commonly thought. This means that it affects science more than might be expected, but that careful study can help us to become mindful of these effects. Within this new framework, a proper understanding of common-sense psychology could lay important new foundations for the future of cognitive science.
 
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Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.