folk psychology

The everyday framework by which people explain and predict behavior by attributing beliefs, desires, intentions, hopes and fears, linked by commonsense generalizations: someone who wants something and believes an action will get it tends to perform that action. Philosophers debate its status: whether it is a tacit theory, as the theory-theory account of theory of mindtheory of mind, n.: Being able to work out what someone else believes, wants or knows — even when it is not what you believe — and to use that to guess what they will do next. Researchers test whether AI has it. holds, or a practice of simulation or interpretation; whether cognitive science will vindicate beliefs and desires as real internal states, as Jerry Fodor argued, or eliminate them as posits of a false theory, as the eliminative materialism of Paul and Patricia Churchland predicts; and whether its predictive success shows only that systems can be treated from the intentional stanceintentional stance, n.: Predicting what something will do by treating it as if it had beliefs and goals — as we do with people, and often with chess programs and chatbots — whatever is really going on inside., as Daniel Dennett held. The same questions arise for AI: whether describing language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. as believing, wanting or intending is literally true, a useful approximation or misleading anthropomorphismanthropomorphism, n.: Treating something that isn't human — a pet, a car, a chatbot — as if it had human thoughts, feelings or intentions. AI that talks fluently makes this temptation unusually strong..