Papers
23
Total Citations
1,482
H-Index
12
About
Stevan Harnad is a towering figure at the intersection of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and open access scholarship. His foundational work on the **symbol grounding problem**—how arbitrary symbols acquire meaning—challenged the foundations of artificial intelligence, arguing that computation alone cannot produce genuine cognition. His influential papers on Searle's Chinese Room argument and the robotic Turing test (collectively garnering over 500 citations) have shaped decades of debate on consciousness and machine intelligence. Harnad is equally renowned as a pioneer of the **open access movement**. His landmark 2006 study, with over 350 citations, demonstrated across ten disciplines that openly accessible articles receive significantly higher citation impact, providing the empirical backbone for global open access policies. He coined the critical distinction between "Green" (self-archiving) and "Gold" (publisher-provided) open access, and his 2012 follow-up paper (140+ citations) tracked disciplinary growth in OA adoption. As creator of the CogPrints archive and longtime editor of *Behavioral and Brain Sciences*, Harnad has been a relentless advocate for making research freely available, fundamentally transforming how science is disseminated and evaluated.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2Minds, machines and Searle238 citations · 1989
- 3Other bodies, other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem228 citations · 1991
- 4Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline142 citations · 2012
- 5
- 6Computation is just interpretable symbol manipulation; cognition isn't87 citations · 1994
- 7Why and how we are not zombies62 citations · 1995
- 8First, scale up to the robotic Turing test, then worry about feeling56 citations · 2008
- 9Minds, Machines and Turing45 citations · 2000
- 10Grounding Symbolic Capacity in Robotic Capacity42 citations · 2018