TY - GEN ID - cogprints2133 UR - http://cogprints.org/2133/ A1 - Harnad, Stevan Y1 - 2002/// N2 - ABSTRACT: What language allows us to do is to "steal" categories quickly and effortlessly through hearsay instead of having to earn them the hard way, through risky and time-consuming sensorimotor "toil" (trial-and-error learning, guided by corrective feedback from the consequences of miscategorisation). To make such linguistic "theft" possible, however, some, at least, of the denoting symbols of language must first be grounded in categories that have been earned through sensorimotor toil (or else in categories that have already been "prepared" for us through Darwinian theft by the genes of our ancestors); it cannot be linguistic theft all the way down. The symbols that denote categories must be grounded in the capacity to sort, label and interact with the proximal sensorimotor projections of their distal category-members in a way that coheres systematically with their semantic interpretations, both for individual symbols, and for symbols strung together to express truth-value-bearing propositions. PB - MIT Press KW - language KW - evolution KW - perception KW - categorization KW - learning KW - symbol systems KW - evolutionary psychology KW - origin of language TI - Symbol grounding and the origin of language SP - 143 AV - public EP - 158 ER -