The symbol grounding problem

Physica D 42:335-346 (1990)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

There has been much discussion recently about the scope and limits of purely symbolic models of the mind and about the proper role of connectionism in cognitive modeling. This paper describes the symbol grounding problem : How can the semantic interpretation of a formal symbol system be made intrinsic to the system, rather than just parasitic on the meanings in our heads? How can the meanings of the meaningless symbol tokens, manipulated solely on the basis of their shapes, be grounded in anything but other meaningless symbols? The problem is analogous to trying to learn Chinese from a Chinese/Chinese dictionary alone. A candidate solution is sketched: Symbolic representations must be grounded bottom-up in nonsymbolic representations of two kinds: iconic representations, which are analogs of the proximal sensory projections of distal objects and events, and categorical representations, which are learned and innate feature-detectors that pick out the invariant features of object and event categories from their sensory projections. Elementary symbols are the names of these object and event categories, assigned on the basis of their categorical representations. Higher-order symbolic representations, grounded in these elementary symbols, consist of symbol strings describing category membership relations. Connectionism is one natural candidate for the mechanism that learns the invariant features underlying categorical representations, thereby connecting names to the proximal projections of the distal objects they stand for. In this way connectionism can be seen as a complementary component in a hybrid nonsymbolic/symbolic model of the mind, rather than a rival to purely symbolic modeling. Such a hybrid model would not have an autonomous symbolic module, however; the symbolic functions would emerge as an intrinsically dedicated symbol system as a consequence of the bottom-up grounding of categories ' names in their sensory representations. Symbol manipulation would be governed not just by the arbitrary shapes of the symbol tokens, but by the nonarbitrary shapes of the icons and category invariants in which they are grounded

Other Versions

reprint Harnad, Stevan (2003) "Symbol‐grounding Problem". In Nadel, L., Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, pp. : Nature Publishing Group (2003)

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 99,210

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
542 (#44,445)

6 months
48 (#100,738)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Stevan Harnad
McGill University

Citations of this work

Color realism and color science.Alex Byrne & David R. Hilbert - 2003 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (1):3-21.
Does thought require sensory grounding? From pure thinkers to large language models.David J. Chalmers - 2023 - Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 97:22-45.
The dynamical hypothesis in cognitive science.Tim van Gelder - 1998 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (5):615-28.
A short primer on situated cognition.Philip Robbins & Murat Aydede - 2008 - In Murat Aydede & P. Robbins (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 3--10.
Operationalising Representation in Natural Language Processing.Jacqueline Harding - 2023 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

View all 328 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references