A Praxical Solution of the Symbol Grounding Problem

Authors:
Mariarosaria Taddeo;Luciano Floridi
Affiliations:
Dipartimento di Filosofia, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Università degli Studi di Padova, Padova, Italy and IEG, University of Oxford, Oxford, Great Britain;IEG, University of Oxford, Oxford, Great Britain and Department of Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Great Britain and St Cross College, University of Oxford, Oxford, Great Britai ...
Venue:
Minds and Machines
Year:
2007

Citing 5
Cited 1

The symbol grounding problem

CNLS '89 Proceedings of the ninth annual international conference of the Center for Nonlinear Studies on Self-organizing, Collective, and Cooperative Phenomena in Natural and Artificial Computing Networks on Emergent computation
Action semantics

Action semantics
Compositional modelling of reflective agents

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection

Reflection '99 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection
Efficient and Scalable Pareto Optimization by Evolutionary Local Selection Algorithms

Evolutionary Computation

The Iterated Classification Game: A New Model of the Cultural Transmission of Language

Adaptive Behavior - Animals, Animats, Software Agents, Robots, Adaptive Systems

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This article is the second step in our research into the Symbol Grounding Problem (SGP). In a previous work, we defined the main condition that must be satisfied by any strategy in order to provide a valid solution to the SGP, namely the zero semantic commitment condition (Z condition). We then showed that all the main strategies proposed so far fail to satisfy the Z condition, although they provide several important lessons to be followed by any new proposal. Here, we develop a new solution of the SGP. It is called praxical in order to stress the key role played by the interactions between the agents and their environment. It is based on a new theory of meaning--Action-based Semantics (AbS)--and on a new kind of artificial agents, called two-machine artificial agents (AM虏). Thanks to their architecture, AM2s implement AbS, and this allows them to ground their symbols semantically and to develop some fairly advanced semantic abilities, including the development of semantically grounded communication and the elaboration of representations, while still respecting the Z condition.