The so-called symbol-grounding problem (SGP) has long plagued cognitive robotics (and AI). If Rob, a humanoid household robot, is asked to remove and discard the faded rose from among the dozen in the vase, and accedes, does Rob grasp the formulae/data he processed to get the job done? Does he for instance really understand the formulae inside him that logicizes “There’s exactly one faded rose in the vase”? Some (e.g., Searle, Harnad, Bringsjord) have presented and pressed a negative answer, and have held that engineering a robot for whom the answer is ‘Yes’ is, or at least may well be, insoluble. This negativity increases if Rob must understand that giving a faded rose to someone as a sign of love might not be socially adept.

We change the landscape, by bringing to bear, in a cognitive robot, an unprecedented, intertwined quartet of capacities that make all the difference: namely, (i) social planning; (ii) multi-modal perception; (iii) pre-meditated attention to guide such perception; and (iv) automated defeasible reasoning about causation. In other words, a genuinely social robot that senses in varied ways under the guidance of how it directs its attention, and adjudicates among competing arguments for what it perceives, solves SGP, or at least a version thereof. An exemplar of such a robot is our PERI.2, which we demonstrate in an environment called ‘Logi-Forms,’ intelligent navigation of which requires social reasoning.