Symbol Grounding Problems and Sensor Design

By Newell and Simon’s [NS81] definition, the semantics and pragmatics of a Physical Symbol System (PSS) are measured ecologically. To fund intelligence, then, some symbols within a PSS must refer to environmental features. To ground these symbols, a PSS must use sensors that gather environmental information for translation into symbolic form. When attempting to divine a PSS’s purpose, the engineer must examine the PSS within its environment. She must, therefore, adopt the role of field linguist: matching posited symbol to environmental referent requires construction of an ontology and translation manual. However, exotic cases of ontology, purpose, sensor and environment, present a task of interpretation as radical as that faced when searching for intelligent extraterrestrial signals: the engineer lacks foreknowledge of the physical and temporal granularity at which to search and of the purpose served by the message. Theoretically, then, she may be limited to recognising PSSs whose ontologies, purposes, sensors and environments are akin to her own, and she may be in danger of imposing the very semantics she seeks to recognise.