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A Critical Review on the Symbol Grounding Problem as an Issue of Autonomous Agents

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KI 2015: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (KI 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9324))

Abstract

Many recent papers claim, that the symbol grounding problem (SGP) remains unsolved. Most AI researchers ignore that and the autonomous agents (or robots) they design indeed do not seem to have any “problem”. Anyway, these claims should be taken rationally, since nearly all these papers make “robots” a subject of the discussion - leaving some kind of impression that what many roboticists do in the long run has to fail because of the SGP not yet being solved. Starting from Searle’s chinese room argument (CRA) and Harnad’s reformulation of the problem, we take a look on proposed solutions and the concretization of the problem by Taddeo’s and Floridi’s “Z condition”. We then refer to two works, which have recently shown that the Z-conditioned SGP is unsolvable. We conclude, that the original, hard SGP is not relevant in the context of designing goal-directed autonomous agents.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Ravensburg-Weingarten University of Applied Sciences, Weingarten, Germany

    Richard Cubek & Wolfgang Ertel

  2. Institute of Neural Information Processing, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany

    Günther Palm

Authors
  1. Richard Cubek
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  2. Wolfgang Ertel
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  3. Günther Palm
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Richard Cubek .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Steffen Hölldobler

  2. Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

  3. Free University Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

    Rafael Peñaloza

  4. Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Sebastian Rudolph

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Cubek, R., Ertel, W., Palm, G. (2015). A Critical Review on the Symbol Grounding Problem as an Issue of Autonomous Agents. In: Hölldobler, S., , Peñaloza, R., Rudolph, S. (eds) KI 2015: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9324. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24489-1_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24489-1_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-24488-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-24489-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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