Table of Contents

1. Foreword (by Belpaeme, Tony); 2. Grounding symbols in the physics of speech communication (by Worgan, Simon F.); 3. Social symbol grounding and language evolution (by Vogt, Paul); 4. How many words can my robot learn? An approach and experiments with one-class learning (by Lopes, Luis Seabra); 5. How human infants deal with symbol grounding (by Cowley, Stephen J.); 6. Semiotic symbols and the missing theory of thinking (by Clowes, Robert); 7. The acquired language of thought hypothesis: A theory of symbol grounding (by Viger, Christopher); 8. Afterword: Life after the symbol system metaphor (by MacDorman, Karl F.); 9. Index

Reviews

The symbol grounding problem continues to stir lively debate among philosophers and cognitive scientists, particularly because AI researchers and roboticists have recently made very concrete proposals on how symbols can become grounded through situated language games played by embodied autonomous agents. This book is full of valuable contributions to the debate. It contains not only conceptual contributions but also new experiments as well as comparisons to child language acquisition and implications for neuroscience.
*Luc Steels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Sony Computer Science Lab, Paris*