A robot's sense-making of fallacies and rhetorical tropes. Creating ontologies of what humans try to say

Johan F. Hoorn*, Denice J. Tuinhof

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

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Abstract

In the design of user-friendly robots, human communication should be understood by the system beyond mere logics and literal meaning. Robot communication-design has long ignored the importance of communication and politeness rules that are ‘forgiving’ and ‘suspending disbelief’ and cannot handle the basically metaphorical way humans design their utterances. Through analysis of the psychological causes of illogical and non-literal statements, signal detection, fundamental attribution errors, and anthropomorphism, we developed a fail-safe protocol for fallacies and tropes that makes use of Frege's distinction between reference and sense, Beth's tableau analytics, Grice's maxim of quality, and epistemic considerations to have the robot politely make sense of a user's sometimes unintelligible demands.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)116-130
Number of pages15
JournalCognitive Systems Research
Volume72
Early online date29 Oct 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This study was supported by Communicating with and Relating to Social Robots (NWO Open Competition Digitalisation, grant 406.DI.19.005). The authors wish to thank Jan Treur and Qixin Wang for reviewing the logics. We are grateful to Rick Cooper for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper. We kindly acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Ivy S. Huang is thanked for her translation of the abstract into Chinese. The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021

Keywords

  • Epistemics of the virtual
  • Logical fallacies
  • Maxim of quality
  • Metaphors
  • Reference
  • Sense
  • Social robots
  • Tableau reasoning

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