12-de Vega-Chap12

In the 1980s, a lot of ink was spent on the question of symbol grounding, largely triggered by Searle’s Chinese room theory (Searle 1980). Searle’s article had the advantage of stirring up discussion about when and how symbols could be about things in the world, whether intelligence involves representations or not, what embodiment means, and under what conditions cognition is embodied. But almost 25 years of philosophical discussion have shed little light on the issue, partly because the discussion has been mixed up with emotional arguments whether artificial intelligence (AI) is possible or not. However, today I believe that sufficient progress has been made in cognitive science and AI so that we can say that the symbol grounding problem has been solved. This chapter briefly discusses the issues of symbols, meanings, and embodiment (the main themes of the workshop), why I claim the symbol grounding problem has been solved, and what we should do next.