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| XKCD: too good to be lost as an ephemeron |
"Another Family for Situation Semantics"I was delighted that no-one had any idea what this pretentious sentiment actually meant. Now I can reveal the extremely tedious truth.
Situation semantics was a non-standard logic developed by Jon Barwise and John Perry in the early 1980s at Stanford University. It was an attempt to create a better semantics for natural language than the more conventional Montague Semantics, by making the model-elements contextually-restricted 'situations' rather than whole worlds. I wrote it up as part of my Ph.D work but it was not central, as it did not lend itself to computational inference. In any event, world-wide interest subsequently slumped.
And families? In best West Coast tradition, their book was written in an irritatingly folksy style, with plenty of examples using 'family situations'.
In retrospect, I cringe.
