The Symbol Grounding Problem has been solved. So what’s next?

In the nineteen eighties, a lot of ink was spent on the question of symbol grounding, largely triggered by Searle’s Chinese Room story (Searle,1980). Searle’s article had the advantage of stirring up discussion about when and how symbols could be about things in the world, whether intelligence involves representations or not, and what embodiment means and under what conditions cognition is embodied. But almost twentyfive years of philosophical discussion have shed little light on the issue, partly because the discussion has been mixed up with emotional arguments whether artificial intelligence is possible or not. However today I believe that sufficient progress has been made in cognitive science and AI so that we can say that the symbol grounding problem has been solved. The paper briefly discusses the issues of symbols, meanings and embodiment, the main themes of the workshop, why I claim the symbol grounding problem has been solved, and what we should do next.