Situation semantics
Encyclopedia
Situation semantics, pioneered by Jon Barwise
Jon Barwise
Kenneth Jon Barwise was an American mathematician, philosopher and logician who proposed some fundamental revisions to the way that logic is understood and used....

 and John Perry
John Perry (philosopher)
John R. Perry is Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He has made significant contributions to areas of philosophy, including logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind...

 in the early 1980s, attempts to provide a solid theoretical foundation for reasoning about common-sense and real world situations, typically in the context of theoretical linguistics, philosophy, or applied natural language processing
Natural language processing
Natural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....

,

Barwise and Perry

Situations, unlike worlds, are not complete in the sense that every proposition or its negation holds in a world. According to Situations and Attitudes, meaning is a relation between a discourse situation, a connective situation and a described situation. The original theory of Situations and Attitudes soon ran into foundational difficulties. A reformulation based on Peter Aczel
Peter Aczel
Peter Aczel is a British mathematician, logician and computer scientist based at the University of Manchester. He is known for his work in non-well-founded set theory and constructive mathematics.-External links:*http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~petera/...

's non-well-founded set theory
Non-well-founded set theory
Non-well-founded set theories are variants of axiomatic set theory which allow sets to contain themselves and otherwise violate the rule of well-foundedness...

 was proposed by Barwise before this approach to the subject petered out in the early 1990s.

Angelika Kratzer

Barwise and Perry's system was a top-down approach which foundered on practical issues which were early identified by Angelika Kratzer
Angelika Kratzer
Angelika Kratzer is a semanticist whose expertise includes modals, turd semantics, turd ferguson, situation semantics, and a range of topics relating to the syntax-semantics interface. She is a professor of linguistics in the department of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst...

and others. She subsequently developed a considerable body of theory bottom-up by addressing a variety of issues in the areas of context dependency in discourse and the syntax-semantics interface. Because of its practical nature and ongoing development this body of work "with possible situations as parts of possible
worlds, now has much more influence than Barwise and Perry’s ideas".

External links

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