Symbol Grounding and the Symbolic Theft Hypothesis
- Resource Type
- Book Chapter
- Authors
- Cangelosi, Angelo; Greco, Alberto; Harnad, Stevan
- Source
- Cangelosi, Angelo and Greco, Alberto and Harnad, Stevan (2002) Symbol Grounding and the Symbolic Theft Hypothesis. [Book Chapter]
- Subject
- Psychology: Perceptual Cognitive Psychology
Perceptual Cognitive Psychology
- Language
Computational simulations are used to model the following: (1) category learning through sensorimotor trial and error ("sensorimotor toil") and how it generates categorical perception (decreased between-category similarity and increased within-category similarity); (2) symbol grounding (the connection between symbols and the sensorimotor categories that they name); (3) the origins of language as the capacity to acquire categories indirectly, by definition alone ("symbolic theft"); and (4) the evolutionary advantage of acquiring categories by this symbolic theft instead of sensorimotor toil.