Why Taddeo and Floridi did not solve the symbol grounding problem

Abstract

The symbol grounding problem (SGP), which remains difficult for AI and philosophy of information, was recently scrutinised by Taddeo and Floridi (Solving the symbol grounding problem: A critical review of fifteen years of research. Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 17, 419–445, 2005; A praxical solution of the symbol grounding problem. Minds and machines, 17, 369–389, doi:10.1007/s11023-007-9081-32005, 2007). However, their own solution to SGP, underwritten by Action-based Semantics, although different from other solutions, does not seem to be satisfactory. Moreover, it does not satisfy the authors' principle, which they dub ‘Zero Semantic Commitment Condition’. In this paper, Taddeo and Floridi's solution is criticised in particular because of the excessively liberal relationship between symbols and internal states of agents, which is conceived in terms of levels of abstraction. Also, the notion of action seems to be seriously defective in their theory. Due to the lack of the possibility of symbols to misrepresent, the grounded symbols remain useless for the cognitive system itself, and it is unclear why they should be grounded in the first place, as the role of grounded symbols is not specified by the proposed solution. At the same time, it is probably one of the best-developed attempts to solve SGP and shows that naturalised semantics can benefit from taking artificial intelligence seriously.