Upon closer examination, and depending on who you read, "symbol grounding" turns out to be either the induction of trivial sensory predicates or the relabeling of a large portion of intelligent behavior as "transduction." Neither activity shows much promise for advancing our understanding of intelligence, although symbol grounding does have some utility in philosophical debates. The proper con- COTi for symbol processing researchers, both connectionist and classical, is to construct and manipulate symbols, not to ground them.
