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Article 5782 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Grounding and Symbols
Message-ID: <1992May20.201113.3883@spss.com>
Date: 20 May 92 20:11:13 GMT
References: <78417@netnews.upenn.edu> <1992May20.170019.26095@kbsw1> <1992May20.181548.7296@cs.ucf.edu>
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In article <1992May20.181548.7296@cs.ucf.edu> gomez@barros.cs.ucf.edu (Fernando Gomez) writes:
>I have trouble with the idea of "grounding" as presented  by
>Harnad  and others.  I read his paper in JTAI. The source of
>my difficulty is that most symbols (I should say concepts  -
>should   he?)   cannot  be  grounded  in  reality.  Consider
>"bachelor." How do you ground this one? It is clear that you
>do  not  find  out that somebody is a bachelor by looking at
>his face, or touching him, etc.  Stimuli do not  help  here.
>"Bachelor" gets its meaning from other symbols which in turn
>are clearly ungroundable: "male" and "unmarried."  (Uhh!  On
>second  thought, I think one could ground "male.") In under-
>standing "bachelor" we are acting not much differently  from
>Searle's  man  in the chinese room.  

"Bachelor" is more abstract than "male", but not any more divorced from 
real-world knowledge.  Compare it with a term I just invented, "borchelor,"
which is composed of the concepts "beige", "bearded," "amateur",
and "on fire."  My word very clearly is just an amalgation of concepts,
and helps us see that "bachelor" is not; it names a class of people
which has a certain meaning in our culture; we have certain stereotypes
and expectations about such people; its meaning has complications that
go beyond "male" and "unmarried" (are Catholic priests bachelors?), etc.  
In other words, it's grounded.

(To me, at least; I'm not speaking for Harnad.)

"Married" is a more interesting case.  It's certainly grounded, like
"bachelor", in our cultural life and in our experiences.  But as Searle
points out, an irreducible element of the meaning of "married" is
a *social convention about what marriage is.*  In other words, one of
its components is not physical, but purely mental.


