Taking a distributed view of language, this paper naturalizes symbol grounding. Learning to talk is traced to – not categorizing speech sounds – but events that shape the rise of human-style autonomy. On the extended symbol hypothesis, this happens as babies integrate micro-activity with slow and deliberate adult action. As they discover social norms, intrinsic motive formation enables them to reshape co-action. Because infants link affect to contingencies, dyads develop norm-referenced routines. Over time, infant doings become analysis amenable. The caregiver of a nine-month-old may, for example, prompt the baby to fetch objects. Once she concludes that the baby uses ‘words ’ to understand what she says, the infant can use this belief in orienting to more abstract contingencies. New cognitive powers will develop as the baby learns to act in ways that are consistent with a caregiver’s false belief that her baby uses ‘words.’

Abstract — Coding can contribute to robot design by suggesting behavioural benchmarks. These, however, depend on the level of analysis. In illustration, semi-formalised rules are used to investigate child-robot encounters. By using behaviour-level codes, we extract information about how children use the robot. This leads to findings about longditudinal changes in how children evaluate its behaviours. Children, we find, use the robot as a social mediator – to prompt synchronized social events. By focusing on a behavioural level, coding can benefit designers of robots, software and sensors. C I.

Abstract. Like computers before them, social robots can be used as a fundamental research tool. Indeed, they can help us to turn our attention from putative inner modules to thinking about the flow and emergence of human intellectual powers. In so doing, much can be gained from seeking solutions to MacDorman’s person problem: how can human bodies – and perhaps robot bodies – attune to cultural norms and, by so doing, construct themselves into persons? This paper explores the hypothesis that social robots can be used to ask fundamental questions about the nature of human agency. For social robots to live up to their name, the focus needs to fall on functional co-ordination and co-action. This enables one to link research on how today’s robots function as social mediators with engineering approaches that explore both how understanding can be hard-wired, how this influences the cultural ecology and, perhaps, in designing robots that can discover how we enact values. To do this new kinds of collaboration need to be established. The key theoretical question is whether, in becoming persons, humans depend on embodiment alone or, as suggested here, intrinsic motive formation enables them to discover the distributed forms of embodiment favoured by culture. 1 1