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— title: "Reading Notes: \"The Symbol Grounding Problem\", Stevan Harnad" date: 2020-02-02 —
cite:harnad1990_symbol_groun_probl defined the symbol grounding problem, which is one of the most influential issues in natural language problems since the 1980s. The issue is to determine how a formal language system, consisting in simple symbols, can be imbued with any meaning.
From the abstract:
How can the semantic interpretation of a formal symbol system can be made intrinsic to the system, rather than just parasitic on the meanings in our heads? How can the meanings of the meaningless symbol tokens, manipulated solely on the basis of their (arbitrary) shapes, can be grounded in anything but other meaningless symbols?
In this landmark paper, Harnad makes the issue explicit, in its context of cognitivism and competing theories of mind and intelligence. He then proposes an original solution based on a combination of symbolic and connectionist properties. The problem itself is still highly relevant to today's NLP advances, where the issue of extracting meaning is still not solved.
What is the symbol grounding problem?
Context: cognitivism, symbolism, connectionism
Cognitivism is the general framework in which all experimental psychology takes place. It replaced old-fashioned behaviorism, replacing it by an empirical science allowing to question the inner workings of brains and minds.
Behaviorism restrained scientific inquiries to external behavior, explicitly forbidding to make theories about what goes on inside the mind. Cognitivism allowed the scientist to make hypotheses about unobservable phenomenons, provided they made predictions testable in an experimental setting.
"Meaning" is one such unobservable phenomenon.