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 Fri 22 October 2010 in Situation Theory tutorial • Tagged with situation semantics, situation theory
Situation theory was developed to support situation semantics. Natural language semantics are rich and the topic of how to represent these semantics, in situation theory or otherwise, is too complex to give justice to here. We will give a basic account of situation semantics as a situated relational …
Posted on Sun 17 October 2010 in Situation Theory tutorial • Tagged with constraints, infon logic, information, situation theory
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 …
Posted on Tue 12 October 2010 in Situation Theory tutorial • Tagged with information, 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 …
Posted on Sun 03 October 2010 in Situation Theory tutorial • Tagged with information, 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 …
Posted on Sun 03 October 2010 in Situation Theory tutorial • Tagged with footnotes, information, references, situation theory
These are footnotes and references for the introduction to situation theory series of articles.
*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 …
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 …