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Situations and attitudes
In this provocative book, Barwise and Perry tackle the slippery subject of "meaning, " a subject that has long vexed linguists, language philosophers, and logicians.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1983
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October 10, 2010
In
The Trouble With Physics
, a book that really deserves to be better known, Lee Smolin draws our attention to a remarkable and worrying dog that didn't bark in the night. There was a revolution in our understanding of the physical world, every thirty years or so, from the time of Newton up until about 1970. We were due for our next one ten years ago; alas, string theory hasn't lived up to its early promise. It's a little early to start panicking, but something appears to have gone wrong. And Smolin thinks it's not just physics.
Well, I wonder if this book isn't another example. Semantics used to be a pretty exciting subject. The question of how to describe the concept of "meaning" was making steady progress. I'm not sure I could pick out milestones as confidently as Smolin does, but I think of Boole and Boolean algebra (mid 19th century), Frege and predicate calculus (late 19th century), de Saussure and the "sign" (early 20th century), Gödel and self-reference (1930s). Then Richard Montague, in the mid-60s, finally put together a coherent theory explaining in precise terms how sentences in English could have meaning. There was no hand-waving, just logic: a breakthough! For my money, Montague was as great a man as Chomsky. Unfortunately, he was gay and very promiscuous; he had a wild lifestyle that ended up with him being murdered in his own home, by person or persons unknown, when he was only 41. Please don't interpret this as criticism of the gay scene. I'm just sad about what it did to semantics.
Situations and Attitudes was supposed to be the next revolution in the subject. Barwise and Perry claimed they had fixed up all the important technical problems in Montague. It came out in 1983, just as I was myself getting into the field, and I read it with huge interest. At the time, I felt I only half understood it, but in retrospect "half" was an overestimate. Now, I would say it was more like a quarter: some of that was my fault, but quite a lot of it was the authors'.
I wasn't the only one getting confused. The Japanese government launched a major research program, the "Fifth Generation Computer Systems project", that was supposed to create a series of "planned breakthroughs" in various areas. One of them was understanding of natural language using Barwise and Perry's Situation Semantics. Many foreign researchers, including me, were invited to Japan on FGCS money - I spent a couple of months hanging out with them in 1989. But when I turned up, it was clear something was wrong. Situation Semantics hadn't delivered, and the revolution wasn't happening.
Though several other groups did much better than the Japanese, they also failed to create another decisive breakthough in semantics. We're still waiting for it. I remember visiting the home of one of my semantician friends in 2007. He had several shelves of books on the subject, and I remarked on them. He made a face, and expressed regret that they no longer seemed to have much relevance to his actual work - he does natural language processing for a major US software company, and he's pretty successful at it, but he was right. We've somehow lost the dream. What happened?
Well, I wonder if this book isn't another example. Semantics used to be a pretty exciting subject. The question of how to describe the concept of "meaning" was making steady progress. I'm not sure I could pick out milestones as confidently as Smolin does, but I think of Boole and Boolean algebra (mid 19th century), Frege and predicate calculus (late 19th century), de Saussure and the "sign" (early 20th century), Gödel and self-reference (1930s). Then Richard Montague, in the mid-60s, finally put together a coherent theory explaining in precise terms how sentences in English could have meaning. There was no hand-waving, just logic: a breakthough! For my money, Montague was as great a man as Chomsky. Unfortunately, he was gay and very promiscuous; he had a wild lifestyle that ended up with him being murdered in his own home, by person or persons unknown, when he was only 41. Please don't interpret this as criticism of the gay scene. I'm just sad about what it did to semantics.
Situations and Attitudes was supposed to be the next revolution in the subject. Barwise and Perry claimed they had fixed up all the important technical problems in Montague. It came out in 1983, just as I was myself getting into the field, and I read it with huge interest. At the time, I felt I only half understood it, but in retrospect "half" was an overestimate. Now, I would say it was more like a quarter: some of that was my fault, but quite a lot of it was the authors'.
I wasn't the only one getting confused. The Japanese government launched a major research program, the "Fifth Generation Computer Systems project", that was supposed to create a series of "planned breakthroughs" in various areas. One of them was understanding of natural language using Barwise and Perry's Situation Semantics. Many foreign researchers, including me, were invited to Japan on FGCS money - I spent a couple of months hanging out with them in 1989. But when I turned up, it was clear something was wrong. Situation Semantics hadn't delivered, and the revolution wasn't happening.
Though several other groups did much better than the Japanese, they also failed to create another decisive breakthough in semantics. We're still waiting for it. I remember visiting the home of one of my semantician friends in 2007. He had several shelves of books on the subject, and I remarked on them. He made a face, and expressed regret that they no longer seemed to have much relevance to his actual work - he does natural language processing for a major US software company, and he's pretty successful at it, but he was right. We've somehow lost the dream. What happened?
January 14, 2026
Reread this quickly, and read closely the additional material added in this reissue edition, which is immensely useful
“Different organisms can rip the same reality apart in different ways, ways that are appropriate to their own needs, their own perceptual abilities and their own capacities for action. This interdependence between the structure its environment displays to an organism and the structure of the organism with respect to its environment is extremely important. For while reality is there, independent of the organism’s individuative activity, the structure it displays to an organism reflects properties of the organism itself.” (P11)
Important point: what is the individuative activity through which situations are carved up, and the world ripped apart?
Important points against Frege: the reference is not a truth value but a described situation. Being attuned to conditional constraints and straying outside the domain where they hold explains error (≈overgeneralization?).
But what of the described situation? Is it an idealization, ie a simplification, in some ways, of reality? Is individuative activity idealization? Are organisms natural-born idealizers? Cf partial structures (O Bueno, J Ladyman)
Awareness discussed as the explicitation of constraints attuned to. Interesting! What does awareness have to do with this exactly?
The whole point of situations is that they do not settle all questions: some matter is left indeterminate. The situation is silent about them. It’s like a visual scene. Like… a picture?
“Different organisms can rip the same reality apart in different ways, ways that are appropriate to their own needs, their own perceptual abilities and their own capacities for action. This interdependence between the structure its environment displays to an organism and the structure of the organism with respect to its environment is extremely important. For while reality is there, independent of the organism’s individuative activity, the structure it displays to an organism reflects properties of the organism itself.” (P11)
Important point: what is the individuative activity through which situations are carved up, and the world ripped apart?
Important points against Frege: the reference is not a truth value but a described situation. Being attuned to conditional constraints and straying outside the domain where they hold explains error (≈overgeneralization?).
But what of the described situation? Is it an idealization, ie a simplification, in some ways, of reality? Is individuative activity idealization? Are organisms natural-born idealizers? Cf partial structures (O Bueno, J Ladyman)
Awareness discussed as the explicitation of constraints attuned to. Interesting! What does awareness have to do with this exactly?
The whole point of situations is that they do not settle all questions: some matter is left indeterminate. The situation is silent about them. It’s like a visual scene. Like… a picture?
December 31, 2017
This is a great intermediate read for one interested in a more up to date theory of objective "meaning" in semantics. It nicely embeds classic Shannonian-esque information theory into a theory of meaning, and postulates a more general theory of knowledge in doing so. However, primarily it gives a series of subs for other scientific fields to use in order to precisely classify their scientific languages.
This is a handy reference in particular to dealing with how to minimize cognitive problems of information asymmetry in communication of epistemic claims. Although I think that much of the mathematical formalization is not especially required in order to understand this work, it does a decent job of formalizing this in the tradition of Russell and others who did so in the past. This organizes the work in a way which can be referenced in other (uh-hmmm) 'situations' of science or logic.
I was genuinely entertained with about 2/3rds of this work. About a third of it was a little dry and unnecessarily detailed in order to drive particular points home; at the moment, these points were not necessary, but perhaps once I begin using these ideas I will think differently or come to understand their use.
This is a handy reference in particular to dealing with how to minimize cognitive problems of information asymmetry in communication of epistemic claims. Although I think that much of the mathematical formalization is not especially required in order to understand this work, it does a decent job of formalizing this in the tradition of Russell and others who did so in the past. This organizes the work in a way which can be referenced in other (uh-hmmm) 'situations' of science or logic.
I was genuinely entertained with about 2/3rds of this work. About a third of it was a little dry and unnecessarily detailed in order to drive particular points home; at the moment, these points were not necessary, but perhaps once I begin using these ideas I will think differently or come to understand their use.
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