A Formal Theory of Commonsense Psychology: How People Think People Think

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.