Lee, Jacob. 2011. Situation Theory: a survey. Master’s Thesis, Fresno, California: California State University Fresno.

Abstract

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 …

Continue reading

Social diffusion processes, real and alleged, have been the focus of intense study for many years, reaching into the early days of anthropology. Because so many different things can be thought to diffuse or flow through a population-- culture, ideas, practices, behaviors, technologies and innovations, opinions, commodities, money, influence, diseases …

Continue reading

Infon Logic

Devlin develops an infon logic framework to be used either by a theorist or by an agent. The description of this logic is relatively informal. Infon logic combines basic infons to form non-basic compound infons. Conjuction and disjunction of infons may be recursively applied to create larger expressions …

Continue reading

Fundamentals of Situation Theory

Situation theory is built on a rich ontology of objects including infons, situations, n-place relations, individuals, spatial and temporal locations, types, parameters, and polarities. We will adopt the account in (Devlin 1991) and assign to each of these a corresponding basic type: INF, SIT, RELn, IND …

Continue reading

What Is Situation Theory?

Situation theory is an information theoretic mathematical ontology developed to support situation semantics, an alternative semantics to the better known possible world semantics originally introduced in the 1950s. Rather than a semantics based on total possible worlds, situation semantics is a relational semantics of partial worlds …

Continue reading

These are footnotes and references for the introduction to situation theory series of articles.

Footnotes

*1*The appropriateness of an object is determined in some way by a role associated with the argument.

*2* This is not precisely true. Some situation theorists distinguish between so-called Austinian and Russelian propositions. Infons …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading

In many ways the field of artificial life has been quite successful, even if its faddish popularity has died off somewhat in the last few years. However, artificial life systems have had only limited success in clearly exhibiting the capacity for open-ended evolution—the capacity to sustain an indefinite increase …

Continue reading

(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 …

Continue reading

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 …

Continue reading