Situations, Topoi, and Dispositions: On the Phenomenological Modelling of Meaning

Submitting to the dualism of the rationalistic tradition of thought and its notions of some (objective) reality and the (subjective) conceptions of it, Barwise/Perry (1983) have presented a new approach to formal semantics which, essentially, can still be considered a mapping of this duality, mediated though by their notion of situation. Within their relational model of meaning , any language expression is tied to reality in two ways: by the discourse situation allowing its meaning being interpreted and by the described situation allowing its interpretation being evaluated truth-functionally. This is achieved by recognizing similarities or invariants between situations that structure a system’s surrounding environments (or fragments thereof). Mapping these invariants as uniformities across situations , cognitive systems attuned to them are able to identify and understand those bits of information which appear to be essential to form these systems’ particular view of reality: a flow of types of situations related by uniformities like individuals, relations, and time-space-locations which constrain “a world teaming with meaning” to become interpretable fragments as persistent courses of events . Thus, the notion of situation allows for the formal identification of both, the (internal) structure of the cognitive subject with the (external) structure of its environment as perceived as a situational fragment of the objective world, a n d the systematic constraints exhibited by related situations with the persistency of coursesof-events for those systems that are properly attuned.