Symbol Grounding

Editors

Tony Belpaeme | University of Plymouth

Stephen J. Cowley | University of Hertfordshire

Karl F. MacDorman | Indiana University

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027222510 | EUR 85.00 | USD 128.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027288745 | EUR 85.00 | USD 128.00

When explaining cognition one must explain how representations in the mind, or symbols, become meaningful by connecting to the external world. This process of connecting symbols with sensorimotor experiences is known as symbol grounding. The classical view of symbol grounding is that it is an individual process: a person or machine interacts with the environment and associates symbols with external experiences.

This volume contains views from different disciplines – ranging from psychology to robotics – on how this view can be extended by first extending symbol grounding to encompass semiotics and by showing how the classical view exaggerates the importance of written language: grounding does not necessarily involve written notations, but rather language is an external cognitive resource that allows us to acquire categories and concepts. Secondly, as symbol grounding relies on language to acquire and coordinate the process and language is a dynamical process rooted in both culture and biology, symbol grounding by extension is also sensitive to culture, emotion and embodiment.

The contributions to this volume were previously published in Interaction Studies 8:1 (2007).

[Benjamins Current Topics, 21] 2009. v, 167 pp.

Publishing status: Available

https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.21

Table of Contents

Foreword

Tony Belpaeme and Stephen J. Cowley | pp. 1–7

Grounding symbols in the physics of speech communication

Simon F. Worgan and Robert I. Damper | pp. 9–32

Social symbol grounding and language evolution

Paul Vogt and Federico Divina | pp. 33–53

How many words can my robot learn? An approach and experiments with one-class learning

Luís Seabra Lopes and Aneesh Chauhan | pp. 55–83

How human infants deal with symbol grounding

Stephen J. Cowley | pp. 85–106

Semiotic symbols and the missing theory of thinking

Robert Clowes | pp. 107–126

The acquired language of thought hypothesis: A theory of symbol grounding

Christopher Viger | pp. 127–144

Afterword: Life after the symbol system metaphor

Karl F. MacDorman | pp. 145–159

Index | pp. 161–167

“The symbol grounding problem continues to stir lively debate among philosophers and cognitive scientists, particularly because AI researchers and roboticists have recently made very concrete proposals on how symbols can become grounded through situated language games played by embodied autonomous agents. This book is full of valuable contributions to the debate. It contains not only conceptual contributions but also new experiments as well as comparisons to child language acquisition and implications for neuroscience.”

Luc Steels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Sony Computer Science Lab, Paris

Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Order by:

Bielecka, Krystyna

2015. Why Taddeo and Floridi did not solve the symbol grounding problem. Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 27:1 ► pp. 79 ff.

Doeben-Henisch, Gerd, Giuseppe Abrami, Marcus Pfaff & Marvin Struwe

2011. IEEE Africon '11, ► pp. 1 ff.

Ferrández, J.M., D. Maravall & J.R. Álvarez-Sánchez

2011. From phenomenological data and sensations to cognition. Neurocomputing 74:8 ► pp. 1157 ff.

Vallée-Tourangeau, Frédéric & Stephen J. Cowley

2013. Human Thinking Beyond the Brain. In Cognition Beyond the Brain, ► pp. 1 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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