The Relational Turn in Understanding Personhood: Psychological, Theological and Computational Perspectives

From the middle of the twentieth-century onwards, there has been a growing emphasis on the importance of relationality in what it means to be human, which we call a “relational turn.” This is found in various domains, including philosophical psychology, psychoanalysis, and theological anthropology. Many have seen a close connection between relationality and personhood. In the second half of the article, we consider the implications of this trend for artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. So far, AI has largely neglected relational intelligence, though that could perhaps be about to change. Cybernetics was rendered more open to assumptions about the contextuality of intelligence by its rather different assumptions from AI. Social robotics increasingly requires relational intelligence, and promising steps might be found in computational modeling of human relationships. Questions about whether robots can achieve personhood are difficult to resolve, though the possibility should not be ruled out.