Towards the Role of Theory of Mind in Explanation

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. We further identify a set of desiderata for explanations that utilize Theory of Mind. These desiderata inform our belief-based account of explanation.