Page 399 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

tence is explained in terms of its truth conditions, and an inference is called 'valid' if the truth conditions of the premises are at least as strong as the truth con- ditions of the conclusion.
Situation semantics is more ambitious. Following Dretske (1981), who takes information as the basic notion of the domain of knowledge and communi- cation, it considers a semantics based on truth con- ditions much too abstract for the analysis of everyday reasoning and the exchange of information in natural language. Instead, it tries to supply a general theory of information extraction and processing which applies to linguistic information exchange as a special case. Within such a theory, truth and validity will only be derivative.
The guiding idea is that meaning is not some idealized or idealizable relation between language and the world, but a very real thing in the world itself. The world is full of information: events happening in one part of the world carry information about events in other parts of the world, and living organisms are able to pick up such information and react accordingly. For instance, the presence of smoke may carry the information that there is fire, and, likewise, the excla- mation 'Fire!' may inform us about the same thing: that there is a fire. Individuals seeing the smoke, or hearing somebody shout 'Fire!' may well be disposed to run away. In both cases, the informational link can be expressed by the word 'means': smoke means fire and 'Fire!' means fire. Of course, smoke's (naturally) meaningfireandFire!'s(conventionally)meaning fire are not the same thing, but they are 'very much the same' from the perspective of an information-pro- cessing agent. Situation theory classes the different species of informational links under a common genus. These links may be natural laws, but they are also linguistic conventions.
1.2 RealismandAttunement
Mere regularities do not give rise to meaning. One can speak of meaning when organisms become 'attuned' to the regularities in their environment, and start to anticipate events on the basis of obtaining events.
Basically then, meaning is taken to be a dis- criminated relation between real events or situations. However, the perceptual and cognitive capacities of living organisms enable a more fine-grained classi- fication of their environment. Organisms may indi- viduate objects, relations, and locations, and classify situations according to whether they support the state of affairs that certain objects stand in certain relations at certain locations. Yet, these objects and relations are considered 'real,' since they are 'uniformities' across situations. Hence, meanings can be deriva- tively,butrealistically,seenasrelationsbetweencom- pounds of aspects of real events, between situations of certain types.
1.3 Partiality andSituations
The most important feature of situation semantics is its partiality. In general, information is a partial description of situations, which are themselves parts of the world. This is consistent with the general idea that meaning is situated in reality. First, information for living organisms concerns their environment, the part of reality in which an organism finds itself. Second, the regularities that enable organisms to extract information obtain between (types of) situ- ations, not between complete worlds. Besides, these regularities usually hold only in parts of the world, for instance in the natural environment of the indi- vidual. As was pointed out, the relevant regularities for organisms are generally not full-blown natural laws; they include conventional regularities con- necting utterances with the things they mean.
1.4 Relativity and Efficiency
The notion of meaning as a relation between situations is another hallmark of the theory. In the situation semantic perspective it is not sentences that convey information or entail one another, but statements, i.e., sentences uttered on a specific occasion. Linguistic meaning is a relation between utterance situations and interpretations, and the meaning of an assertively used indicative sentence 0 is a relation between situations inwhich<f>isutteredontheonehand,andthecol- lection of described situations that constitute 0 's interpretation on the other. This relational account of meaning sheds new light on the so-called 'efficiency of language.' This phenomenon, more familiarly known as 'context dependence,' is the connection between described situations and the (partial) contexts in which language is used. For example, it is (part of) the mean- ing of the personal pronoun T that it refers to the speaker—not some unique speaker in the whole wide world, but the unique speaker in an utterance situ- ation. More generally, the notion of meaning as a relation between (types of) situations can exploit all kinds of facts in the utterance situation which are relevant for establishing the interpretation of that utterance.
2. Situation Theory
The major tenet of situation theory is that reality consists of situations. Situations can be perceived and stand in causal relations to one another. They exhibit uniformities to living organisms. The basic uni- formities that human beings recognize are individuals (a,b,...), n-ary relations (f,...,where n^O), and locations (/,/',...). These uniformities we find reflected in human languages. Individuals are thought of as the real things known to us, which figure in different situations. Relations (including properties) are also seen as invariants across real situations. Locations are taken to be regions of space-time. They
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