Simba: belief ascription by way of simulative reasoning
Hans Chalupsky · 1996
A key cognitive faculty that enables humans to communicate with each other is their ability to incrementally construct and use models describing the mental states of others, in particular, models of their beliefs. Not only do humans have beliefs about the beliefs of others, they can also reason with these beliefs even if they do not hold them themselves. If we want to build an artificial or computational cognitive agent that is similarly capable, we need a formalism that is fully adequate to represent the beliefs of other agents, and that also specifies how to reason with them. Standard formalizations of knowledge or belief, in particular the various epistemic and doxastic logics, seem to be not very well suited to serve as the formal device upon which to build an actual computational agent. They neglect either representation problems, or the reasoning aspect, or the defeasibility that is inherent in reasoning about somebody else's beliefs, or they use idealizations which are problema...