Behavior-based robotics has always been inspired by earlier cybernetics work such as that of Grey Walter. It emphasises that intelligence can be achieved without the kinds of representations common in symbolic AI systems. The paper argues that such representations might indeed not be needed for many aspects of sensori-motor intelligence but become a crucial issue when bootstrapping to higher levels of cognition. It proposes a scenario in the form of evolutionary language games by which embodied agents develop situated grounded representations adapted to their needs and the conventions emerging in the population.
