Proefschrift
Theory of mind in language, minds, and machines: a multidisciplinary approach
Humans can see the world through the eyes of other humans and imagine what they know, want, and intend. This competence is known as Theory of Mind.
- Auteur
- B.M.A. van Dijk
- Datum
- 17 januari 2025
- Links
- Thesis in Leiden Repository
One way to encode and decode Theory of Mind in social traffic is by using language. This dissertation examines the relationship between Theory of Mind and language through narratives as a natural place for finding minds and the ways they are presented via language. By employing computational, qualitative and experimental approaches, varying from narratological theory to recent language models from artificial intelligence, this dissertation aspires to provide a new perspective on the relationship between two key human competences. In brief this dissertation's findings are that complex story character minds are often accompanied by more a complex story language; that children represent story character speech and thought in many different ways; that language models can be useful tools in unravelling language development; that only a few large language models show behaviour consistent with having Theory of Mind competence; and that a pragmatic perspective on ‘real understanding’ in LLMs can nuance current debates about cognitive capacities in recent artificially intelligent language models.