Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!princeton!mind!harnad
From: harnad@mind.UUCP (Stevan Harnad)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: The symbol grounding problem: McCarthy's query
Message-ID: <915@mind.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 26-Jun-87 01:07:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: mind.915
Posted: Fri Jun 26 01:07:40 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 27-Jun-87 05:17:48 EDT
References: <764@mind.UUCP> <768@mind.UUCP> <770@mind.UUCP> <6174@diamond.BBN.COM> <1172@houdi.UUCP>
Organization: Cognitive Science, Princeton University
Lines: 35
Summary: Summary of Symbol Grounding Discussion
Xref: mnetor comp.ai:574 comp.cog-eng:147



In article 208 of comp.ai.digest: JMC@SAIL.STANFORD.EDU (John McCarthy)
asks:

>	I imagine that the alleged point at issue and a few of the positions
>	taken could be summarized for the benefit of those of us whose
>	subjective probability that there is a real point at issue is too
>	low to motivate studying the entire discussion but high enough to
>	motivate reading a summary.

The point at issue concerns how symbols in a symbol-manipulative
approach to the modeling of mind can be grounded in something other
than more symbols so that their meanings and their connections to
objects can be independent of people's interpretations of them. One of
the positions taken was that connecting a purely symbolic module to
peripheral (transducer/effector) modules in the right way should be
all you need to ground the symbols. I suggested that all this is
likely to yield is more of the toy models that symbolic AI has produced
until now. To get human-scale (Total Turing Test) performance
capacity, a bottom-up hybrid nonsymbolic/symbolic system may be
needed, one in which the elementary symbols are the names of sensory
categories picked out by inductive (possibly connectionist) feature-filters
(categorical representations) and invertible analogs of sensory projections
(iconic representations). This model is described in "Categorical Perception:
The Groundwork of Cognition" (Cambridge University Press 1987,
S. Harnad, ed., ISBN 0-521-26758-7). Other alternatives that have been
mentioned by others in the discussion included: (1) symbol-symbol "grounding"
is already enough and (2) connectionist nets already generate grounded
"symbols." If you want the entire file, I've saved it all...
-- 

Stevan Harnad                                  (609) - 921 7771
{bellcore, psuvax1, seismo, rutgers, packard}  !princeton!mind!harnad
harnad%mind@princeton.csnet       harnad@mind.Princeton.EDU