Stevan Harnad (1993) Problems, Problems: the Frame Problem as a Symptom of the Symbol Grounding Problem
. Psycoloquy: 4(34) Frame Problem (11)
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Psycoloquy 4(34): Problems, Problems: the Frame Problem as a Symptom of the Symbol Grounding Problem
PROBLEMS, PROBLEMS: THE FRAME PROBLEM AS A SYMPTOM OF THE SYMBOL GROUNDING PROBLEM
Commentary on Van Brakel & Fetzer on Ford & Hayes on the Frame-Problem
Stevan Harnad
Laboratoire Cognition et Mouvement
URA CNRS 1166 I.B.H.O.P.
Universite d'Aix Marseille II
13388 Marseille cedex 13, France
33-91-66-00-69
harnad@riluminy.univ-mrs.fr
Abstract
There arrear to be both ecumenical and hegemonic
sentiments in the air. One solution is "scaling up", that more and
more ungrounded sentences, pushing the frame's limits wider and
wider, will eventually shrink the remaining "frame problems" to
only those that we, the interpreters, are also prone to. So we will
either not notice them or cease to regard them as evidence that
there is something wrong with this kind of model in the first
place, however, I think the reason the frame problem keeps rearing
its head is because there is something intrinsically wrong with an
ungrounded symbolic approach to modeling the mind. Knowledge cannot
be "framed" with symbols alone. I believe a better candidate
solution happens to be to try to ground a system's internal symbols
in its robotic capacity to discriminate, manipulate, categorize,
name, describe, and discourse coherently about the objects, events
and states of affairs that its symbols are systematically
interpretable as being about indistinguishabley from the way we
(humans) do it. In short, symbolic capacities are to be grounded in
robotic capacities.
Keywords
Frame-problem, artificial intelligence, temporal logics,
independent persistence, attention, Hume, dynamic frames,
qualification problem.
References
- Fetzer, J. H. (1993a) Van Brakel's Position Appears to be Incoherent. PSYCOLOQUY 4(14) frame-problem.4.
- Fetzer, J. H. (1993b) Philosophy Unframed. PSYCOLOQUY 4(33) frame-problem.10.
- Ford, K.M. & Hayes, P.J. (1991) Reasoning Agents in a Dynamic World: The Frame Problem, Greenwich: JAI Press.
- Harnad, S. (1987) The induction and representation of categories. In: Harnad, S. (ed.) Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Harnad, S. (1990) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Physica D 42: 335-346.
- Harnad, S. (1992) Connecting Object to Symbol in Modeling Cognition. In: A. Clarke and R. Lutz (Eds) Connectionism in Context Springer Verlag.
- Harnad, S., Hanson, S.J. & Lubin, J. (1991) Categorical Perception and the Evolution of Supervised Learning in Neural Nets. In: Working Papers of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Machine Learning of Natural Language and Ontology (DW Powers & L Reeker, Eds.) pp. 65-74. Presented at Symposium on Symbol Grounding: Problems and Practice, Stanford University, March 1991.
- Hayes, P.J. (1992) Summary of "Reasoning Agents in a Dynamic World: The Frame Problem" (Ford & Hayes 1991, Eds.) PSYCOLOQUY 3(59) frame-problem.1.
- Hayes, P.J. and Ford, K.M. (1993) Effective Descriptions Need Not Be Complete. PSYCOLOQUY 4(21) frame-problem.5.
- McCarthy, J (1963) Situations, Actions and Causal Laws. Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project, Memo 2.
- McCarthy, J and Hayes, P (1969) Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of Artificial Intelligence. In B. Meltzer & D. Michie (eds) Machine Intelligence 4. Elsevier.
- van Brakel, J. (1992) The Complete Description of the Frame Problem. PSYCOLOQUY 3(60) frame-problem.2.
- van Brakel, J. (1993) Unjustified Coherence. PSYCOLOQUY 4(23) frame-problem.7.