Construct · 5 fields · 13 citations

Where does grounding collide?

One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.

● jingle · one word, five constructs Nearest construct by meaninggroundcompare the meanings
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Every construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to grounding is ground.

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COMMON GROUND → SOURCEgrounding5 CONSTRUCTSAIHARNAD · RETRIEVALPsycholinguisticsCLARK · COMMON GROUNDMetaphysicsIN VIRTUE OF · FINEGrounded theoryGLASER · STRAUSS · GIOIAElectrical eng.EARTH · FAULT PATH

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1967Grounded theory1986Psycholinguistics1990AI2001Metaphysics2007Electrical eng.
2026

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Artificial intelligence

Grounding as tying symbols to something outside the symbol system

The connection between a system's internal tokens and the world, source, or experience they are supposed to be about. Harnad posed the symbol grounding problem in 1990: a system that manipulates symbols only by their shapes cannot get meaning from other symbols, any more than one could learn Chinese from a Chinese–Chinese dictionary, so at least some symbols must be grounded in sensorimotor categories. Bisk and colleagues restated the demand for language models in 2020 as a ladder of world scopes, from corpus to perception to embodiment to social interaction. Lewis and colleagues' 2020 retrieval-augmented generation gave the word its engineering meaning: an output is grounded when it is conditioned on and attributable to retrieved documents. The three uses share a direction (from symbol to something that is not a symbol) and disagree about whether a document counts.[1][2][3]

Unit
A system's symbols or outputs, relative to a referent, sensor stream, or source document
Recovery means
Grounding is itself the remedy, the fix for /hallucination is to bring the output back under a source
Measured by
Attribution and faithfulness to retrieved passages; success on embodied and multimodal tasks; not measured for the philosophical problem

Psycholinguistics

Grounding as the collaborative work of establishing common ground

The process by which two people in conversation establish, moment by moment, that what one said has been understood well enough for current purposes. Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs showed in 1986 that pairs describing abstract figures converged on shorter labels over rounds, because referring is a joint act, not a one-way transmission. Clark and Brennan fixed the term in 1991: contributions are grounded by acknowledgement, continued attention, or a relevant next turn, and the cost of grounding shifts with the medium. Clark's 1996 book made it the engine of language use. The unit is a pair of people and the criterion is a mutual belief (that the addressee has understood) which no single speaker can supply alone.[4][5][6]

Unit
A contribution to a conversation, between two or more participants
Recovery means
Repair, a clarification sequence that restores mutual understanding after it slips
Measured by
Referential communication tasks; counts of words and turns to agreement; acknowledgement and repair rates across media

Metaphysics

Grounding as the relation that makes one fact hold in virtue of another

A non-causal relation of determination between facts: the fact that the set is non-empty holds in virtue of the fact that it has a member, and not the other way round. Fine reintroduced the notion in 2001 as the key to what realism claims, that some facts are fundamental and others obtain because of them. Schaffer's 2009 essay reframed metaphysics as the study of what grounds what, with the structure of reality given by a priority ordering rather than by an inventory of what exists. Rosen's 2010 paper set out the logic: grounding is irreflexive, asymmetric, transitive, and distinct from both supervenience and reduction. The relata are facts, nothing is connected to the world, and there is nothing to measure.[7][8][9]

Unit
A pair of facts, one holding in virtue of the other
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Not measured; argued from cases and from the formal properties of the relation

Qualitative management research

Grounding as theory built up from data rather than imposed on it

A methodology in which theory is generated from systematically collected qualitative data through iterative coding, constant comparison, and theoretical sampling, so that the resulting categories are grounded in what participants said and did. Glaser and Strauss set it out in 1967 against a sociology that tested grand theory rather than discovering it. Charmaz's 2006 constructivist revision kept the procedures and dropped the claim that theory emerges untouched by the analyst. Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton's 2013 method (first-order informant terms, second-order researcher themes, aggregate dimensions, displayed in a data structure) is the form most management journals now expect. Grounding here is a claim about where the concepts came from, and the reader judges it by the audit trail from quotation to category.[10][11][12]

Unit
A theory or category, relative to the corpus of data it was built from
Recovery means
Not applicable, a category that is not grounded is dropped or recoded
Measured by
Not measured; assessed by the visible chain from data to codes to themes, theoretical saturation, and member checks

Electrical engineering

Grounding as a conducting connection to the earth

A conducting connection, intentional or accidental, between an electrical circuit or equipment and the earth or a conducting body that serves in place of it. IEEE Standard 142, the Green Book, fixes the practice and separates two purposes that the single word hides: system grounding, which ties a point of the supply such as the transformer neutral to earth to limit voltage and stabilise it under fault, and equipment grounding, which bonds exposed metal so that a fault current has a low-impedance path back to the source and trips the protection. The thing grounded is a conductor, the reference is the potential of the earth, and the criterion is a number of ohms.[13]

Unit
A circuit point or a piece of equipment, relative to earth potential
Recovery means
Fault clearing, the protective device operating because the ground path carried enough current
Measured by
Ground-electrode resistance; ground-fault current; touch and step voltages under fault

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Nearby collisions

hallucination6 fields · 14 citationsjingle · one name, six constructsknowledge6 fields · 12 citationsjingle · one name, six constructsemergence5 fields · 12 citationsjingle · one word, five constructsground4 fields · 7 citationsjingle · one word, four constructs

References

  1. Harnad, S. (1990). The symbol grounding problem. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 42(1–3), 335–346. https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-2789(90)90087-6
  2. Bisk, Y., Holtzman, A., Thomason, J., Andreas, J., Bengio, Y., Chai, J., Lapata, M., Lazaridou, A., May, J., Nisnevich, A., Pinto, N., & Turian, J. (2020). Experience grounds language. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 8718–8735). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.703
  3. Lewis, P., Perez, E., Piktus, A., Petroni, F., Karpukhin, V., Goyal, N., Küttler, H., Lewis, M., Yih, W.-t., Rocktäschel, T., Riedel, S., & Kiela, D. (2020). Retrieval-augmented generation for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33. arXiv:2005.11401 https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2005.11401
  4. Clark, H. H., & Wilkes-Gibbs, D. (1986). Referring as a collaborative process. Cognition, 22(1), 1–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(86)90010-7
  5. Clark, H. H., & Brennan, S. E. (1991). Grounding in communication. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine, & S. D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition (pp. 127–149). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10096-006
  6. Clark, H. H. (1996). Using language. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511620539
  7. Fine, K. (2001). The question of realism. Philosophers' Imprint, 1(2), 1–30.
  8. Schaffer, J. (2009). On what grounds what. In D. J. Chalmers, D. Manley, & R. Wasserman (Eds.), Metametaphysics: New essays on the foundations of ontology (pp. 347–383). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199546046.003.0012
  9. Rosen, G. (2010). Metaphysical dependence: Grounding and reduction. In B. Hale & A. Hoffmann (Eds.), Modality: Metaphysics, logic, and epistemology (pp. 109–136). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199565818.003.0007
  10. Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Aldine.
  11. Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. Sage.
  12. Gioia, D. A., Corley, K. G., & Hamilton, A. L. (2013). Seeking qualitative rigor in inductive research: Notes on the Gioia methodology. Organizational Research Methods, 16(1), 15–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428112452151
  13. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. (2007). IEEE recommended practice for grounding of industrial and commercial power systems (IEEE Std 142-2007). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/IEEESTD.2007.4396963

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