---
abstract: "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.\n"
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  - http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad02.symlang.htm
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creators_name:
  - family: Harnad
    given: Stevan
    honourific: ''
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date: 2002
date_type: published
datestamp: 2002-03-12
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  - family: Scheutz
    given: Matthias
    honourific: ''
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eprintid: 2133
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keywords: 'language, evolution, perception, categorization, learning, symbol systems, evolutionary psychology, origin of language'
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:54
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pagerange: 143-158
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publication: 'Computationalism: New Directions'
publisher: MIT Press
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referencetext: |+
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status_changed: 2007-09-12 16:43:05
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title: Symbol grounding and the origin of language
type: bookchapter
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