# A robot's sense-making of fallacies and rhetorical tropes. Creating ontologies of what humans try to say

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.09689 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09689/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Epistemic reflections on AI answering our questions: overwatch, erudite, logician, interlocutor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14352/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the design of user-friendly robots, human communication should be understood by the system beyond mere logics and literal meaning. Robot communication-design has long ignored the importance of communication and politeness rules that are 'forgiving' and 'suspending disbelief' and cannot handle the basically metaphorical way humans design their utterances. Through analysis of the psychological causes of illogical and non-literal statements, signal detection, fundamental attribution errors, and anthropomorphism, we developed a fail-safe protocol for fallacies and tropes that makes use of Frege's distinction between reference and sense, Beth's tableau analytics, Grice's maxim of quality, and epistemic considerations to have the robot politely make sense of a user's sometimes unintelligible demands. Keywords: social robots, logical fallacies, metaphors, reference, sense, maxim of quality, tableau reasoning, epistemics of the virtual