Meaning in Artificial Agents: The Symbol Grounding Problem Revisited

The Chinese room argument has presented a persistent headache in the search for Artificial Intelligence. Since it first appeared in the literature, various interpretations have been made, attempting to understand the problems posed by this thought experiment. Throughout all this time, some researchers in the Artificial Intelligence community have seen Symbol Grounding as proposed by Harnad as a solution to the Chinese room argument. The main thesis in this paper is that although related, these two issues present different problems in the framework presented by Harnad himself. The work presented here attempts to shed some light on the relationship between John Searle’s intentionality notion and Harnad’s Symbol Grounding Problem.

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