Symbol Grounding - Consciousness

Consciousness

Here is where the problem of consciousness rears its head. For there would be no connection at all between scratches on paper and any intended referents if there were no minds mediating those intentions, via their own internal means of picking out those intended referents.

So the meaning of a word on a page is "ungrounded." Nor would looking it up in a dictionary help: If one tried to look up the meaning of a word one did not understand in a (unilingual) dictionary of a language one did not already understand, one would just cycle endlessly from one meaningless definition to another. One's search for meaning would be ungrounded. In contrast, the meaning of the words in one's head—those words one does understand—are "grounded" (by a means that cognitive neuroscience might eventually reveal to us). And that grounding of the meanings of the words in one's head mediates between the words on any external page one reads (and understands) and the external objects to which those words refer.