We aim to build a conceptual framework for artificial intelligence (AI) that gives priority to social relationships as a key component of intelligent behaviour. It starts from Weizenbaum's premise that intelligence manifests itself only relative to specific social and cultural contexts. This is in contrast to one prevailing view, which sees intelligence as an abstract capability of the individual based on a mechanism for rational thought. The new approach is not based on the idea that the mind is a rational processor of symbolic information, nor does it require the idea that thought is a kind of abstract problem-solving with a semantics that can be understood independently of its embodiment. Instead, priority is given to affective and mimetic responses that serve to engage the whole organism in the life of the communities in which it participates. Intelligence is seen not as the deployment of capabilities for problem-solving, but as the continual, everchanging and unfinished engagement with the environment in terms of narratives. The construction of the identity of the intelligent individual involves the appropriation or taking up of positions within the narratives in which it participates. Thus, the new approach argues that the functioning mind is shaped by the meaning ascribed to experience, by its situation in the social matrix, and by practices of self and of relationship into which its life is recruited. Classic AI models such as goal-directed problem solving then can be seen as special cases of narrative practices instead of as ontological foundations. There are implications for representation and performativity that have given us new confidence in the form of a 'strong AT attitude.
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