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

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

References

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