Reflecting on the debate

This chapter presents the main positive argument in favour of a symbolic framework. It discusses experimental evidence that supports the embodiment approach, with special attention to the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) experiments. It focuses on abstract meaning and addresses the problem of reference, which is at the heart of the grounding problem, and how symbolic and embodied frameworks can account for referential processing. It discusses the neuroscience data that show how perceptual and motor areas in the brain are recruited in the processing of meaning, the role of the traditional linguistic areas, and other higher-order processing regions of the brain. It explores how meaning could be reduced to computations and how fields of artificial intelligence and robotics might contribute to clarifying some issues in the current debate. It focuses on how the embodiment and symbolic frameworks can be incorporated into theories of complex learning and education.