Symbol grounding
The problem of how symbols can have meaning in themselves, and not merely because they point to other symbols.
Definition
The psychologist Stevan Harnad formulated it in 1990 with an image: try to learn Chinese with nothing but a Chinese–Chinese dictionary. Every word leads to other words, endlessly, without ever touching ground. For us, meaning is anchored in perception, action, the body.
Large language models have reopened the question with force. They learned the world through texts — that is, through the dictionary. Some see this as proof that they understand nothing; others, that the structure of relations between words already contains much of the world. The debate touches on what we ourselves mean by “understanding”.
See also
Related notions
In the essays
In the library