Situation theory and situation semantics

Publisher Summary

Situation semantics is a mathematically based theory of natural language semantics introduced by the mathematician Jon Barwise in 1980, and developed jointly by Barwise and the philosopher John Perry (and subsequently several others) throughout the 1980s. Initially, situation semantics was conceived as essentially synthetic, with a mathematical ontology built up on set theory. Soon after the appearance of Barwise and Perry, 1983, however, the authors changed their approach and decided to handle the topic in an analytic fashion, abstracting a mathematical ontology from analyses of natural language use. Situation theory is the name they gave to the underlying mathematics that arose in that manner. From the mid 1980s onward, therefore, situation semantics was an analysis of semantic issues of natural language based on situation theory. It is important to realize that, the use of mathematical concepts notwithstanding, in situation theory and situation semantics, situations are taken to be real, actual parts of the world, and tile basic properties and relations the situation semantics deals with are taken to be real uniformities across situations.