The University of Southampton
University of Southampton Institutional Repository

Symbol Grounding is an Empirical Problem: Neural Nets are Just a Candidate Component

Symbol Grounding is an Empirical Problem: Neural Nets are Just a Candidate Component
Symbol Grounding is an Empirical Problem: Neural Nets are Just a Candidate Component
"Symbol Grounding" is beginning to mean too many things to too many people. My own construal has always been simple: Cognition cannot be just computation, because computation is just the systematically interpretable manipulation of meaningless symbols, whereas the meanings of my thoughts don't depend on their interpretability or interpretation by someone else. On pain of infinite regress, then, symbol meanings must be grounded in something other than just their interpretability if they are to be candidates for what is going on in our heads. Neural nets may be one way to ground the names of concrete objects and events in the capacity to categorize them (by learning the invariants in their sensorimotor projections). These grounded elementary symbols could then be combined into symbol strings expressing propositions about more abstract categories. Grounding does not equal meaning, however, and does not solve any philosophical problems.
Harnad, S
442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b
Harnad, S
442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b

Harnad, S (1993) Symbol Grounding is an Empirical Problem: Neural Nets are Just a Candidate Component. Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Other)

Abstract

"Symbol Grounding" is beginning to mean too many things to too many people. My own construal has always been simple: Cognition cannot be just computation, because computation is just the systematically interpretable manipulation of meaningless symbols, whereas the meanings of my thoughts don't depend on their interpretability or interpretation by someone else. On pain of infinite regress, then, symbol meanings must be grounded in something other than just their interpretability if they are to be candidates for what is going on in our heads. Neural nets may be one way to ground the names of concrete objects and events in the capacity to categorize them (by learning the invariants in their sensorimotor projections). These grounded elementary symbols could then be combined into symbol strings expressing propositions about more abstract categories. Grounding does not equal meaning, however, and does not solve any philosophical problems.

Text
harnad93.cogsci.html - Other
Download (32kB)

More information

Published date: 1993
Venue - Dates: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 1993-01-01
Organisations: Web & Internet Science

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 253367
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/253367
PURE UUID: 42dc02d5-b320-4611-9533-7272fed92a04
ORCID for S Harnad: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-6153-1129

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 25 May 2000
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 02:48

Export record

Contributors

Author: S Harnad ORCID iD

Download statistics

Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.

View more statistics

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact ePrints Soton: eprints@soton.ac.uk

ePrints Soton supports OAI 2.0 with a base URL of http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/cgi/oai2

This repository has been built using EPrints software, developed at the University of Southampton, but available to everyone to use.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we will assume that you are happy to receive cookies on the University of Southampton website.

×