Posted on Mon 12 December 2011 in Situation Theory • Tagged with information theory, semantic information, situation semantics, situation theory
A common problem facing those interested in learning about situation theory and situation semantics for the first time is knowing where to begin. The goal of this blog post is to save my readers as much time and effort as possible by pointing them to the key references in the …
Posted on Fri 28 October 2011 in Situation Theory • Tagged with channel theory, information, information flow, situation semantics, situation theory
Lee, Jacob. 2011. Situation Theory: a survey. Master’s Thesis, Fresno, California: California State University Fresno.
Situation semantics was developed as an alternative to possible-worlds semantics. While possible-worlds semantics defines the informational content of sentences in terms of complete descriptions of the way the world is or might be …
Posted on Tue 27 September 2011 in Situation Theory • Tagged with situation theory
John Sowa writes:
Theories of semantics based on possible worlds cannot derive purpose or intention from collections of worlds, no matter how big, or from collections of situations, no matter how small. In their theory of situations, Barwise and Perry (1983) tried to use finite situations rather than infinite worlds …
Posted on Mon 06 June 2011 in Situation Theory • Tagged with channel theory, information flow, situation theory
The channel theory of Jeremy Seligman and Jon Barwise [1] is intended to help us understand information flows of the following sort: a's being F carries the information that b is G. For example, we might want a general framework in which understand how a piece of fruit's bitterness …
Posted on Sun 03 October 2010 in Situation Theory • Tagged with information, situation theory
I will be presenting a series of articles introducing various forms of situation theory and situation semantics. I open up with an edited collection notes on an important paper by David Israel and John Perry, entitled "What is Information".
David Israel and John Perry introduce a series of working principles …
Posted on Fri 03 September 2010 in Situation Theory • Tagged with information, information architecture, ritual
(published and featured at the Open Anthropology Cooperative 09/03/10)
In a series recent blog posts, here, here and here, I have explored John Perry and David Israel's notion of an information architecture given in their paper Information and Architecture (pdf). In particular I have been exploring their notions …
Posted on Thu 02 September 2010 in Situation Theory • Tagged with information, information architecture, programming languages
In my previous two posts, Architecture of Information, some notes and More on Combinative and Coincident Information Architectures, I introduced John Perry and David Israel's notion of information architectures. In this post I would like to explore how they can inform us about the semantics of some common programming language …
Posted on Fri 27 August 2010 in Situation Theory • Tagged with information, information architecture
In the interest of exploring Perry and Israel's information architectures further, I will elaborate upon my previous post on the topic, and give a more fine-grained account of some of their ideas.
Suppose that we take as signal the presence of smoke, and its indicated content that there is a …
Posted on Fri 06 August 2010 in Situation Theory • Tagged with information, information architecture
Notes on "Information and Architecture" by John Perry and David Israel
David Israel and John Perry build upon the idea of pure and incremental content (developed in previous work) to introduce their notion of an information system of signal structures, describing three general kinds of information architectures: coincident architectures, combinative …