Hi,
The real "grounding problem" is the awkward and annoying fact that if you presume a KR format, you can't reverse engineer a learning mechanism that reliably fills that KR with knowledge.
Sure... To go back to the source, in http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.sgproblem.html it is written " Suppose you had to learn Chinese as a first language and the only source of information you had was a Chinese/Chinese dictionary![8] This is more like the actual task faced by a purely symbolic model of the mind: How can you ever get off the symbol/symbol merry-go-round? How is symbol meaning to be grounded in something other than just more meaningless symbols?[9] This is the symbol grounding problem ... The standard reply of the symbolist (e.g., Fodor 1980, 1985) is that the meaning of the symbols comes from connecting the symbol system to the world "in the right way." But it seems apparent that the problem of connecting up with the world in the right way is virtually coextensive with the problem of cognition itself. " I suppose this is basically another way of saying the same thing that you said above... But, what I would say in response to you is: If you presume a **bad** KR format, you can't match it with a learning mechanism that reliably fills one's knowledge repository with knowledge... If you presume a sufficiently and appropriately flexible KR format (which is then really more of a meta-format), then it can reformat itself adaptively based on the knowledge that comes in, as part of the learning process ;-) My conjecture is that a probabilistic weighted, labeled hypergraph -- with an appropriate collection of node/link types -- is a sufficiently and appropriately flexible KR format, which can be made to adapt itself based on the data within it, via coupling it with a careful combination of evolutionary and inferential learning mechanisms... -- Ben ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
