A Critical Review on the Symbol Grounding Problem as an Issue of Autonomous Agents

Many recent papers claim, that the symbol grounding problem (SGP) remains unsolved. Most AI researchers ignore that and the autonomous agents (or robots) they design indeed do not seem to have any “problem”. Anyway, these claims should be taken rationally, since nearly all these papers make “robots” a subject of the discussion - leaving some kind of impression that what many roboticists do in the long run has to fail because of the SGP not yet being solved. Starting from Searle’s chinese room argument (CRA) and Harnad’s reformulation of the problem, we take a look on proposed solutions and the concretization of the problem by Taddeo’s and Floridi’s “Z condition”. We then refer to two works, which have recently shown that the Z-conditioned SGP is unsolvable. We conclude, that the original, hard SGP is not relevant in the context of designing goal-directed autonomous agents.

[1]  H. Putnam.  Meaning and Reference , 1973 .

[2]  Chris Fields,et al.  Equivalence of the Symbol Grounding and Quantum System Identification Problems , 2014, Inf..

[3]  Michael J. Mayo,et al.  Symbol Grounding and its Implications for Artificial Intelligence , 2003, ACSC.

[4]  Paul R. Cohen,et al.  Continuous Categories For a Mobile Robot , 1999, AAAI/IAAI.

[5]  R. A. Brooks,et al.  Intelligence without Representation , 1991, Artif. Intell..

[6]  R. Sun.  Symbol grounding: A new look at an old idea , 2000 .

[7]  Mariarosaria Taddeo,et al.  A Praxical Solution of the Symbol Grounding Problem , 2007, Minds and Machines.

[8]  Andrew Melnyk.  Searle's abstract argument against strong AI , 2004, Synthese.

[9]  Moritz Tenorth,et al.  KNOWROB — knowledge processing for autonomous personal robots , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[10]  Selmer Bringsjord,et al.  The symbol grounding problem … remains unsolved , 2015, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[11]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  Symbol grounding problem , 1990, Scholarpedia.

[12]  John R. Searle,et al.  Minds, brains, and programs , 1980, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[13]  J. Moor.  The Pseudorealization Fallacy and the Chinese Room Argument , 1988 .

[14]  Matthias Fichtner.  Anchoring Symbols to Percepts in the Fluent Calculus , 2010, KI - Künstliche Intelligenz.

[15]  Luc Steels,et al.  Situated Grounded Word Semantics , 1999, IJCAI.

[16]  David J Cole.  Thought and thought experiments , 1984 .

[17]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  What's Wrong and Right About Searle's Chinese Room Argument? , 2001 .

[18]  Selmer Bringsjord,et al.  Real Robots and the Missing Thought-Experiment in the Chinese Room Dialectic , 2003 .

[19]  Mariarosaria Taddeo,et al.  Solving the symbol grounding problem: a critical review of fifteen years of research , 2005, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[20]  Rodney A. Brooks,et al.  Elephants don't play chess , 1990, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[21]  Krystyna Bielecka,et al.  Why Taddeo and Floridi did not solve the symbol grounding problem , 2015, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[22]  L. Wittgenstein,et al.  Philosophische Untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations , 1953 .

[23]  Günther Palm,et al.  High-level learning from demonstration with conceptual spaces and subspace clustering , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[24]  Luc Steels,et al.  Grounding adaptive language games in robotic agents , 1997 .

[25]  Vincent C. Müller.  Which symbol grounding problem should we try to solve? , 2015, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[26]  Silvia Coradeschi,et al.  Perceptual anchoring via conceptual spaces , 2004, AAAI 2004.

[27]  Paul Davidsson.  Toward a general solution to the symbol grounding problem: combining machine learning and computer vision , 1993, AAAI 1993.

[28]  Alessandro Saffiotti,et al.  An introduction to the anchoring problem , 2003, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[29]  L. Steels,et al.  coordinating perceptually grounded categories through language: a case study for colour , 2005, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[30]  Matthew R. Walter,et al.  Approaching the Symbol Grounding Problem with Probabilistic Graphical Models , 2011, AI Mag..

[31]  D. Chalmers.  The conscious mind: in search of a fundamental theory , 1996 .

[32]  Stevan Harnad,et al.  First, scale up to the robotic Turing test, then worry about feeling , 2008, Artif. Intell. Medicine.

[33]  A. Cangelosi,et al.  Symbol grounding and the symbolic theft hypothesis , 2002 .