Artificial Believers: The Ascription of BeliefModeling of individual beliefs is essential to the computer understanding of natural languages. Phenomena at all levels -- syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic -- cannot be fully analyzed in the absence of models of a hearer and of the hearer's model of other believers. The heart of this text is the presentation of an artificial intelligence (AI) program intended to simulate certain aspects of a human believer. This book provides a prolog program, Viewgen, that maintains belief structures about the world and other believers, and is able to ascribe beliefs to others without direct evidence by using a form of default reasoning. The authors contend that a plausible model such as this can -- in the best cognitive science tradition -- shed light on the long-standing philosophical problem of what belief is. The issues presented here will be of considerable interest to an informed general reader as well as those with a background in any of the disciplines that make up what is now called cognitive science: philosophy, linguistics, psychology, neuropsychology, and also AI itself. |
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agent algorithm approach artificial believer Artificial Intelligence ascribe beliefs assume assumption atypical belief autoepistemic logic Ballim Barnden Bel John Bel Mark Bel System belief ascription belief environments belief revision belief spaces claim cognitive science computational conflict consider construct context default rule define definition degenerate environments dialogue difficult discussed entities evaluation relation example explicit expression find first Fodor formal formula Frank hearer human individuals inference intensional objects issue Jim's father John believes John’s knowledge Konolige languages of thought linguistic lisp logic machine Mary meaning mental metaphor modal logic natural language Natural Language Processing nesting notion one’s partitions percolation philosophical phone number predicate problem propositional attitudes pushing Rapaport reasoning represent representation scientific semantics sense sentences Situation Semantics SNePs speaker specific speech acts structures SW’s System believes system Figure system’s view thalassemia theory of belief tion topic environment truth utterance ViewGen viewpoint Wilks