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From Sensorimotor Categories to Grounded Symbols

From Sensorimotor Categories to Grounded Symbols
From Sensorimotor Categories to Grounded Symbols
Once you can produce and understand a proposition at all, you can produce and understand any and every proposition. Propositions are all statements about category membership. So once you have made the transition from purposive pantomime to truth-valued propositions you have the full power of language to define, describe and explain any category at all: the full power of symbolic instruction, just as long as it is grounded, like the kernel of all dictionaries, in sensorimotor induction. In the beginning was the category; with propositions came the word.
language, evolution, categories, category learning, propositions, pantomime
Harnad, Stevan
442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b
Harnad, Stevan
442ee520-71a1-4283-8e01-106693487d8b

Harnad, Stevan (2009) From Sensorimotor Categories to Grounded Symbols (In Press)

Record type: Monograph (Project Report)

Abstract

Once you can produce and understand a proposition at all, you can produce and understand any and every proposition. Propositions are all statements about category membership. So once you have made the transition from purposive pantomime to truth-valued propositions you have the full power of language to define, describe and explain any category at all: the full power of symbolic instruction, just as long as it is grounded, like the kernel of all dictionaries, in sensorimotor induction. In the beginning was the category; with propositions came the word.

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More information

Accepted/In Press date: 2009
Keywords: language, evolution, categories, category learning, propositions, pantomime
Organisations: Web & Internet Science

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 268030
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/268030
PURE UUID: 898ee5dd-726f-4b17-a079-a65896e9393f
ORCID for Stevan Harnad: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-6153-1129

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 07 Oct 2009 14:22
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 02:48

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Contributors

Author: Stevan Harnad ORCID iD

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