The papers collected in this special issue emerged from an international workshop on symbol grounding organised at the University of Plymouth on 3 and 4 July 2006 by the Distributed Language Group. Our goal was to extend the classical view of symbol grounding by recognising that language and cognitive dynamics are mutually constitutive. Specifically, we aimed to do so by bringing researchers who study human signalling together with others who focus on simulating intelligence and language. In the original call for papers, we set out these objectives as follows: Specifically, we wish to invite contributions viewing language and cognition as linking what goes on in the head with causal processes that are intersubjective, multimodal, affect-laden, and organised by historically rooted customs and artefacts. … The purpose of the workshop is not so much to present completed work as to find new ways of tackling a complex issue and to launch collaboration among participants to that end. … Since the workshop focuses on how symbol grounding can be reconsidered when language is viewed as a dynamical process rooted in both culture and biology, research

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

Baby steps: A design proposal for more believable motion