Grounded language in open systems

Many attempts were made in the past to describe natural language, boolean algebra and artificial intelligence but they didn't reflect about the symbol grounding problem. Stevan Harnad was the first researcher who introduced the subject in the year 1990. Grounded language works with a 2 box system, see the figure.

The box on the left is the human who describes the reality with natural language. The box on the right is the environment which can be perceived with sensors. Symbol grounding is the connection between both boxes.

From a system perspective the 2 box system is an open system because both boxes are connected to each other. Natural language from the left box is referencing to physical objects in the right box, while perceived reality in the right box gets described with English words in the left box.

The assumption is, that there are 2 different systems available which are working with different internal logic. The language layer consists of nouns, verbs, adjectives and grammars which is the symbolic layer. In contrast, the environment has no natural language but it consists of sensor perception, motor actions and 3d objects. The 2 box paradigm describes in a simplified format what natural language is about. Its an abstraction mechanism for the reality. Physical objects like a table or a banana are labeled with words. The ability to label objects is the key element in grounded language and allows to build intelligent robots.