ABOUT THIS BOOKSituation Theory grew out of attempts by Jon Barwise in the late 1970s to provide semantics for "naked-infinitive" perceptual reports such as 'Claire saw Jon run'. Barwise's intuition was that Claire didn't just see Jon, an individual, but Jon doing something, a situation. Situations are individuals having properties and standing in relations. A theory of situations would allow us to study and compare various types of situations or situation-like entities, such as facts, events and scenes.
One of the central themes of situation theory is that a theory of meaning and reference should be set within a general theory of information, one moreover that is rich enough to do justice to perception, communication and thought. By now many people have contributed to the development and application of situation theory, constrained by the need to account for certain kinds of semantic phenomena, and by the need to give a rigorous mathematical account of the principles of information that underwrite the theory.
This volume presents work that evolved out of the First Conference on Situation Theory and Its Applications held by CSLI at Asilomar, California, in March 1989. The nineteen papers included here fall into three categories. Those in Part I explore logical and mathematical issues that arise within situation theory. The papers in Part II connect situation theory with other approaches to logical issues, while those in Part III apply various version of situation theory to a number of linguistic issues.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Contributors
Part I. Situation Theory: 1. Replacement systems and the axiomatization of situation theory Peter Aczel
2. Information, infons, and inference Jon Barwise and John Etchemendy
3. Infons and types in an information-based logic Keith Devlin
4. On the logic of situation theory Tim Fernando
5. Partial sets Michael W. Mislove, Lawrence S. Moss, and Frank J. Oles
6. An illative theory of relations Gordon Plotkin
7. Perspectives in situation theory Jerry Seligman
8. Parametric types and propositions in first-order situation theory Dag Westerståhl
Part II. Logical Applications: 9. Dewey on defeasibility Thomas Burke
10. Three indexical solutions to the liar paradox Robert Koons
11. The complexity of paradox William C. Rounds
Part III. Linguistic Applications: 12. Situating word meaning Nick Braisby
13. Information in the early stages of language acquisitions Robin Cooper
14. Locations now and then Judith Merriam Crow
15. Argument roles and anaphora Elisabet Engdahl
16. Some puzzles about pronouns Jean Mark Gawron and Stanley Peters
17. Out of the mouths of babes Elizabeth Macken
18. Situations, games, and ambiguity Prashant Parikh
19. Conditionals and unconditionals in universal grammar and situation semantics Dietmar Zaefferer
Name index
Subject index.