Re: Symbol Grounding Problem (attn: Vend)

HMSBeagle <jsbach@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:55:14 GMT, Neil W Rickert <phishing@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

The real problem for humans is not grounding symbols. Rather it
is symbolizing the ground. We don't start with words and seek to
discover their meaning; we start with meanings and seek to usefully
attach words to that meaning.

Woah! I think you completely misread the article! The Symbol
Grounding Problem is a problem for AI researchers attempting to build
a robotic agent that can engage in symbol grounding. It's not a
problem that humans face, and the article never made any such claim.

Harnad is approaching the SGP from a psychology standpoint, which is
fine. From this perspective the question is not "how do we build it
or simulate it?" but rather "how do actual organisms perform it?"

And that is precisely what I was commenting on. Evidently I did
not misread the article after all. And my comment was that actual
organisms don't ground symbols.

And furthermore, you are wrong that we do not start with words and
seek to discover their meaning.

Strictly speaking, words don't have meanings. People have meanings,
and use words as they attempt to convey those meanings. Sure,
we are sometimes faced with spoken or written expressions that we
must try to understand. But how we do this -- or at least how I
do this -- isn't really discovery of meanings of words.

The article then gets into what the proper "meaning" entails, does it
also entail the referent itself existing in the real world? Is that
seperate?

I think you mean that it gets into what some philosophers of
language, particularly those of the Frege school, take "meaning"
to entail. You may safely assume I am not an adherent of that
point of view.

2nd Example: Have you ever read a novel? The book itself is just
ink-markings on pages. In effect, you START WITH SYMBOLS and have to
SEEK to discover their meaning.

Bad example. When I am reading a novel, most of the words used
are already in my vocabulary. So no meaning discovery is required for
reading that novel.

Any time you read a sentence that
you have never seen before in your life, you must seek to discover its
meaning by parsing it.

Oh, nonsense. We can normally read without having to parse the
sentences. We learn to read before we learn how to parse.

The SGP, as the article states, seems to be the set of "rules" with
which an organism goes from symbol to referent.

And I am disagreeing with this whole "set of rules" idea. There is
no such set of rules.

--
DO NOT REPLY BY EMAIL - The address above is a spamtrap.

Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science, Northern Illinois Univ., DeKalb, IL 60115
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Symbol Grounding Problem (attn: Vend)
    ... attach words to that meaning. ... seek to discover their meaning. ... also entail the referent itself existing in the real world? ... Consider three phrases: ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: Symbol Grounding Problem (attn: Vend)
    ... attach words to that meaning. ... seek to discover their meaning. ... also entail the referent itself existing in the real world? ... Consider three phrases: ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: Symbol Grounding Problem (attn: Vend)
    ... attach words to that meaning. ... seek to discover their meaning. ... also entail the referent itself existing in the real world? ... Consider three phrases: ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: Symbol Grounding Problem (attn: Vend)
    ... attach words to that meaning. ... organisms don't ground symbols. ... seek to discover their meaning. ... language, particularly those of the Frege school, take "meaning" ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)
  • Re: Bafflingly unable to read
    ... Charlton Wilbur wrote: ... e> doing wandering into this group. ... I think it's a difference between not being able to parse Tolkien's ... sentences for meaning (and anyone who can't do that is probably not ...
    (rec.arts.sf.written)