a solution to it. The mind/body problem is actually the feeling/function problem, and symbol-grounding touches only its functional component. This does not detract from the importance of the symbol grounding problem, but just reflects that it is a keystone piece to the bigger puzzle called the mind. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio investigates this marking function of feelings and emotions in his somatic marker hypothesis. Damasio adds the notion of biologic homeostasis to this discussion, presenting it as an automated bodily regulation process providing intentionality to a mind via emotions. Homeostasis is the mechanism that keeps all bodily processes in healthy balance. All of our actions and perceptions will be automatically "evaluated" by our body hardware according to their contribution to homeostasis. This gives us an implicit orientation on how to survive. Such bodily or somatic evaluations can come to our mind in the form of conscious and non-conscious feelings ("gut feelings") and lead our decision-making process. The meaning of a word can be roughly conceptualized as the sum of its associations and their expected contribution to homeostasis, where associations are reconstructions of sensorimotor perceptions that appeared in contiguity with the word. Yet, the somatic marker hypothesis is still hotly debated and critics claim that it has failed to clearly demonstrate how these processes interact at a psychological and evolutionary level. The recurrent question that the somatic marker hypothesis does not address remains: how and why does homeostasis (as in any servomechanism such as a thermostat and furnace) become felt homeostasis? See also Binding problem Categorical perception Communicative action Consciousness Formal language Formal system Frame problem Hermeneutics Interpretation Physical symbol system Pragmatics Semantics Semiosis Semiotics Sign Sign relation Situated cognition Syntax Turing machine Notes References Note: This article is based on an entry originally published in Nature/Macmillan Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science that has since been revised by the author and the Wikipedia community. Blondin Masse, A, G. Chicoisne, Y. Gargouri, S. Harnad, O. Picard, O. Marcotte (2008) How Is Meaning Grounded in Dictionary Definitions? TextGraphs-3 Workshop, 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Coling 2008, Manchester, 18–22 August 2008 Cangelosi, A. & Harnad, S. (2001) The Adaptive Advantage of Symbolic Theft Over Sensorimotor Toil: Grounding Language in Perceptual Categories. Evolution of Communication 4(1) 117–142. Cangelosi, A.; Greco, A.; Harnad, S. From robotic toil to symbolic theft: grounding transfer from entry-level to higher-level categories. Connection Science12(2) 143–62. Fodor, J. A. (1975) The language