  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
