Home > Uncategorized > How can you tell whether a robot is referring?

How can you tell whether a robot is referring?

In brief: I still don’t know yet.











Pointless logics


Objects as spindles




Categories: Uncategorized
  1. 2015-03-14 at 21:09

    “So if someone claims that by message M, agent A means proposition P”
    Consider not ascribing meaning to messages outside of agents.
    By message M, agent A means that agent A believes P and intends all recipients B to believe P too.

    This model accounts for trust, lying, ambiguity of references, being misinformed.

    P might include a reference Z that A intends to refer to X. B reads M and decides to trust A enough to start believing P as well, but B’s understanding of Z is different; A thinks Z means X but B thinks Z means something different. If the difference matters, then B was wrong to have so completely trusted A without translation

    • 2015-04-19 at 01:43

      I’m not sure why you think I’m ascribing meaning to messages outside of agents. I was careful to establish early on in this series of posts that it’s better not to do so, and I think I’ve been careful. If I’ve omitted the agent in places that’s because in context the applicable agent is clear.

      I don’t think belief is necessarily linked to communication, even when it’s propositional communication. If A generates M if and only if P, then A generating M means that P, regardless of what A believes. We might conclude from A generating M that A believes M, but that is not part of the meaning of M; and it could easily be wrong, as when A experiences a failure. And it is odd to ascribe meaning to a robot generating a message M. We don’t generally think of robots as being mentally enriched or ‘intentional’ enough to be capable of belief. They just do what they do without indulging in propositional attitudes.

      Communication and trust aren’t uniquely linked. If there is a failure in an engineered system, that is just a flaw in the system or its design, or operation outside its operating zone. That’s true whether it’s a system of communicating agents or some other kinds of system. If a system has multiple parts made by different engineers, and the interests of the engineers are not aligned, that’s when we will see a difference between a flaw (e.g. misinterpretation) and sabotage (e.g. lying, misinformation, betrayal), and that is where trust comes in. Trust is a judgment as to whether another party will act in your interest or not, in some particular situation. But trust figures into all kinds of system interactions, not just communication, so it should be treated orthogonally. Agents’ communication behavior is like the interaction of a bolt and a nut; trust is about whether generation and interpretation will meet a spec (or unwritten social norm), or whether a bolt will hold.

      My point in the post is that it’s really unclear how to scientifically assay what B’s understanding of a message-part Z is. What experiments do you do on B to find out what that understanding is? You can see what B does with any number of messages that contain Z, but that only tells you the meanings of B generating/interpreting those messages, not anything about what it does with messages containing Z that you didn’t assay.

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