心理理论作为思维的领域专用语言
Theories of Mind as Domain-Specific Languages of Thought
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- Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
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中文总结 AI 辅助
本文将心理理论形式化为领域专用编程语言（如memo），通过语法结构模拟社会推理，并阐释其在处理无界情境、模块化认知交互及发展差异方面的理论价值。
中文摘要 AI 辅助
“心理理论”究竟是一种什么样的东西？我们提议将心理理论形式化为领域专用的编程语言，这种语言可用于推理其他智能体的心理状态。我们的提议建立在“思考类似于用内部‘思维语言’进行编程”这一长期存在的观点之上。但与其假定存在一种适用于所有思维的统一通用语言，我们假定存在一系列领域专用的思维语言，其各自的语法和语义编码了不同领域的理论。我们通过一个名为 memo 的真实编程语言，在直觉心理学领域具体化这一想法；memo 通过诸如“知道”、“想要”和“认为”等领域专用语法结构，专门用于心理理论推理。我们认为，运用一个人的心理理论来思考社会情境，类似于使用 memo 编写一个模拟该情境的程序。通过一系列实例，我们展示了将心理理论形式化为一种类似 memo 的编程语言，如何能为心理理论研究中的各种理论问题提供洞见：(1) 一个单一的、固定的直觉理论如何被用来推理具有无界结构变化的社会情境；(2) 一个模块化的、领域专用的、信息封装的社会认知系统如何与外部世界知识以及其他认知系统（如直觉物理学）进行交互；(3) 不同的心理理论（例如儿童与成人的心理理论）如何不同，随着理论在发展过程中的增长，究竟获得了什么，以及这种增长可能如何发生。
英文摘要
What kind of thing is a ``theory of mind''? We propose to formalize theories of mind as domain-specialized programming languages, which can be used to reason about the mental states of other agents. Our proposal builds on the longstanding idea that thinking is akin to programming in an internal ``language of thought.'' But rather than positing a single general-purpose language for all of thought, we posit a collection of domain-specific languages of thought, whose respective syntaxes and semantices encode the theories of various domains. We make this idea concrete in the domain of intuitive psychology using a real-world programming language called memo, which is specialized for theory-of-mind reasoning via domain-specialized syntactic constructs like ``knows,'' ``wants,'' and ``thinks.'' In our view, using one's theory-of-mind to think about a social situation is analogous to using memo to write a program that models that situation. Through a series of worked examples, we show how formally representing a theory of mind as a memo-like programming language can lend insight into a variety of theoretical issues in theory-of-mind research: (1) how a single, fixed intuitive theory can be used to reason about social situations with unbounded structural variation; (2) how a modular, domain-specialized, and informationally-encapsulated system for social cognition might interface with external world knowledge, as well as other cognitive systems like intuitive physics; and (3) how different theories of mind, such as those of children and adults, differ, what exactly is gained as theories grow over the course of development, and how that growth might occur.
