Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Situation Theory This conceptual revolution
was, ultimately, about the meaning of life, and therefore affects Semantics. The US mathematicians Jon
Barwise and John Perry devised a "situational
semantics" which reverses Frege's theory of meaning. According to the tradition founded at the end of
the 19th century by the German mathematician and philosopher Gottlob
Frege, meaning is located in the world of sense. On the contrary, Barwise and Perry anchor their theory
of meaning to a biological fact: the world is full of meaning that living
organisms can use. Meaning is not
exclusive of language: it is pervasive in nature (e.g., smoke means fire).
Meaning involves the informational content of situations and arises from
regularities in the world. Reality is made of situations. Meaning arises out of
recurring relations between situations.
Barwise's unit of reasoning are situations because reality comes in
situations. Situations are made of objects and spatio-temporal locations;
objects have properties and stand in relations. A living organism (a part of
the world capable of perception and action) must be able to cope with the ever
new situations thrown up during its course of events and to anticipate the
future course of events. It must be able to pick up information about one
situation from another situation. This
can be realized by identifying similarities between situations, and relations
between such similarities. Each organism performs this process of breaking down
reality in a different way, as each organism "sees" reality in a
different way, based on its ecological needs.
The type of a situation is
determined by the regularities that the situation exhibits. Regularities are
acquired by adaptation to the environment and define the behavior of an
organism in the environment. The similarities between various situations make
it possible for an organism to make sense of the world. At the same time they
are understood by all members of the same species, by a whole "linguistic
community". Formally, one situation can
contain information about another situation only if there is a relation that
holds between situations sharing similarities with the former situation and
situations sharing similarities with the latter situation. In that case the first situation
"means" the second. Meaning is defined as relations that allow one
situation to contain information about another situation. Barwise emphasizes the
"relational" nature of perception (e.g., perception is a relation
between perceiver and perceived) and the "circumstantial" nature of
information (information is information about the world). The mind, which
processes that information, is strictly controlled by the environment. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Ecological Realism: The Embodied Mind" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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