Grounding is the central concept to the whole paper, and is thought of as the most important question about the possibility of AI by some people.
Grounding seems to be defined as 'hooking' symbol manipulation to external objects.
Similarly, there are also arguments for why thoughts are not intrinsic, and since the paper seems to rely on the fact that they are a lot, it may be important to decide whether they actually are or not. Also, the matter of free will needs to be discussed. Therefore, for a robot, actions could be thought of as possibly being able to be just as intrinsic. The Chinese Room example describes symbol manipulation by demonstrating a person not speaking Chinese as still being able to follow rules to produces answers written in Chinese. It seems a bit strange that Chinese-speaking observers could conclude the person did understand, because they would be unlikely to conclude a calculator understands the sums it does, and there does not seem to be much difference.