A Formal Theory of Commonsense Psychology
How People Think People Think

This book formalizes commonsense knowledge to enable artificial intelligence to understand and engage with the mental lives of people.

Andrew S. Gordon (Author), Jerry R. Hobbs (Author)

9781107151000, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 September 2017

584 pages
26 x 18.2 x 3.3 cm, 1.2 kg

Commonsense psychology refers to the implicit theories that we all use to make sense of people's behavior in terms of their beliefs, goals, plans, and emotions. These are also the theories we employ when we anthropomorphize complex machines and computers as if they had humanlike mental lives. In order to successfully cooperate and communicate with people, these theories will need to be represented explicitly in future artificial intelligence systems. This book provides a large-scale logical formalization of commonsense psychology in support of humanlike artificial intelligence. It uses formal logic to encode the deep lexical semantics of the full breadth of psychological words and phrases, providing fourteen hundred axioms of first-order logic organized into twenty-nine commonsense psychology theories and sixteen background theories. This in-depth exploration of human commonsense reasoning for artificial intelligence researchers, linguists, and cognitive and social psychologists will serve as a foundation for the development of humanlike artificial intelligence.

Part I. Commonsense Psychology: 1. Commonsense psychology and psychology
2. Commonsense psychology and computers
3. Formalizing commonsense psychology
4. Commonsense psychology and language
Part II. Background Theories: 5. Eventualities and their structure
6. Traditional set theory
7. Substitution, typical elements, and instances
8. Logic reified
9. Functions and sequences
10. Composite entities
11. Defeasibility
12. Scales
13. Arithmetic
14. Change of state
15. Causality
16. Time
17. Event structure
18. Space
19. Persons
20. Modality
Part III. Commonsense Psychology Theories: 21. Knowledge management
22. Similarity comparisons
23. Memory
24. Envisioning
25. Explanation
26. Managing expectations
27. Other agent reasoning
28. Goals
29. Goal themes
30. Threats and threat detection
31. Plans
32. Goal management
33. Execution envisionment
34. Causes of failure
35. Plan elements
36. Planning modalities
37. Planning goals
38. Plan construction
39. Plan adaptation
40. Design
41. Decisions
42. Scheduling
43. Monitoring
44. Execution modalities
45. Execution control
46. Repetitive execution
47. Mind-body interaction
48. Observation of plan executions
49. Emotions.

Subject Areas: Natural language & machine translation [UYQL], Artificial intelligence [UYQ], Computer architecture & logic design [UYF], Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Computational linguistics [CFX]