A computer program capable of acting intelligently in the world must have a general representation of the world in terms of which its inputs are interpreted. Designing such a program requires commitments about what knowledge

From its beginnings, artificial intelligence has borrowed freely from the vocabulary of psychology. The use of the word "intelligence " to label our area of research is a case in point. Other terms referring originally to human mental processes that have considerable currency in Al are "thinking, " "comprehending, " and, with increasing frequency in the past five years, "understanding." In fact, these terms are probably used more freely in Al than in experimental psychology, where a deep suspicion of "mentalistic " terminology still lingers as a heritage of behaviorism. It is not my intent to engage in a barren lexicographic exercise, nor to bait those among us who are aroused to indignant emotion whenever terms

Symbol Grounding tries to answer the question as to how it is possible for a computer program to use symbols which are not arbitrarily interpretable. Whereas the signs in conventional programs are just "parasitic on the meaning in our heads", grounded symbols should possess at least some "intrinsic meaning." This paper gives a brief overview of what Symbol Grounding is and summarizes some of today's connectionist Symbol Grounding models. Instead of concentrating on cognitive linguistics, we try to present an alternative view of Symbol Grounding. Our analysis reveals that Symbol Grounding is in fact the endeavour of automated model construction. Although it originated in a somewhat anti-formal spirit it is (necessarily) full of parallels to classical symbolic logic. We present our view that Symbol Grounding is in fact a connectionist version of transcendental logic, which is the basis for generating formal models of non-formal domains. Such formalizations are inherently logical, though ...

AI has often mistreated logic and abduction. A closer view at the historical roots of logic and at the system theoretic structure of logical modeling reveals that the foundations of logic lie in a science of argumentation rather than reasoning. The basis of such a science is a clarification of the term "argument" that also leads to a reduction of the semantics of natural language. In logic, the reductions are tacit semantic restrictions to specialized meanings of terms and forms of conceptual relations as they are used in arguments. These relations are the conditions of the possibility of conceptual reference and at the same time of logical reasoning, where abduction and the identification of something as something form the basis of both.

Symbol Grounding has originated in the domain of cognitive connectionism as an approach to a model of language acquisition.It has, however, transcended this restricted domain and its most prominent proponents now regard it as a technique which is of general importance to the connectionist-symbolic debate, especially for their integration into a common framework. This paper revisits the claims made by symbol grounders and summarizes different models which have been presented to date. We try to answer the question what Symbol Grounding really is all about and point to its parallels with classical logic and reasoning which have not received sufficient attention so far. 1 The Origin of Symbol Grounding 1.1 Overview This paper is intended to evaluate recent developments within a specific subarea of symbolicconnectionist integration. This subarea consists of several connectionist approaches to the problem of grounding meaning in perception through somehow connecting sensory experience to s...