Towards the Role of Theory of Mind in Explanation

Abstract

Theory of Mind is commonly defined as the ability to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs, goals) to oneself, and to others. A large body of previous work---from the social sciences to artificial intelligence---has observed that Theory of Mind capabilities are central to providing an explanation to another agent or when explaining that agent’s behaviour. In this paper, we build and expand upon previous work by providing an account of explanation in terms of the beliefs of agents and the mechanism by which agents revise their beliefs given possible explanations. Our account satisfies a number of important desiderata which we posit must be met by accounts of explanation that purport to employ Theory of Mind, in contrast to previous work which has addressed some but not all of these desiderata.