Symbol Grounding and Proportional Analogy
Peter Turney,
Apperceptual,
Jul 01, 2009
"If symbols must be grounded in perception," writes Peter Turney, "how does this grounding happen?" We might naively suppose a 'picture' theory of meaning, along the lines of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, but this version quickly falls to objections such as Quine's 'gavagai' example, cited here. But I don't think Turney's proposal, to ground them in relations ("we note meta correlations between relations between symbols"), fares any better. The meta correlations are still radically underdetermined by the phenomena; this is the root of Quine's challenge. There's a similarity between this approach, and Minsky's "second-order-differences", and Russell's theory of types, and as I share Wittgenstein's dissatisfaction with the latter, I am dissatisfied with the former. Yes, symbols are grounded in perception - but we must redefine what "grounded" means.
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