Prof. S. Harnad, Southampton

Lecture
Oesterreichisches Forschungsinstitut fuer Artificial Intelligence (OeFAI)
                      Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Wien
 Tel.: +43-1-53361120, Fax: +43-1-5336112-77, Email: sec@ai.univie.ac.at
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                                VORTRAG
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Prof.Dr.Stevan HARNAD
Southampton University
United Kingdom


              SYMBOL GROUNDING AND THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE

The Symbol Grounding Problem concerns the question of how to connect
meaningless symbols to what they mean, rather than to just further 
meaningless symbols, all systematically interpretable to an outside
mind, but meaningless in and of themselves. Evolution has clearly 
solved this problem in the case of both natural language and the 
language of thought. How has it done so? Some very simple artificial-
life simulations of the adaptive advantages of symbolic "theft" over
sensorimotor "toil" will be presented as a hint of how and why this
might have taken place.


Zeit: Mittwoch, 19.Mai 1999, 18:30 Uhr pktl. 
Ort:  OeFAI, Schottengasse 3, 1010 Wien 1.


OESTERREICHISCHES FORSCHUNGSINSTITUT
FUER ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

o.Univ.-Prof.Dr.Robert Trappl