%0 Journal Article %1 Win85 %A Winograd, T. %D 1985 %J Linguistics and Philosophy %K sem %N 1 %P 91-104 %T Moving the Semantic Fulcrum %V 8 %X This article is W.'s response to Barwise and Perry's Situation Semantics. W. suggests that B & P, while remaining within the realist tradition, have moved the 'semantic fulcrum' by accepting a different view of what constitute real things, the primitives into which reality is carved up, from the Montagovians. B & P accept individuals, relations and locations as primitive, and do not require possible worlds to figure in their ontology. While acknowledging that their formal treatment allows for more elegant handling of things like discourse situations, etc. he feels they have not addressed the real problem, which for him involves rejecting the realist assumption that there is a reality independent of language use for language to map onto. For W. meaning is determined by use of language within a community, and language should be viewed as activity rather than description. He introduces 2 analaogies: (1) economics could suppose a value function which maps each object onto a real value and market activity could then be viewed as perturbations to the real value - W. suggests that a better perspective is to view value as determined by activities of buying and selling (2) relation of roads to terrain - terrain conditions road placement but does not determine it - road placement is more fundamentally determined by prior human needs and wants - who needs to go where. W. suggests situation semantics may be useful for describing increasingly more sophisticated artificial languages (e.g. computer languages) where the assumptions it makes about a neatly d ivided world existing independently of the language hold true.

@article{Win85, abstract = { This article is W.'s response to Barwise and Perry's Situation Semantics. W. suggests that B \& P, while remaining within the realist tradition, have moved the 'semantic fulcrum' by accepting a different view of what constitute real things, the primitives into which reality is carved up, from the Montagovians. B \& P accept individuals, relations and locations as primitive, and do not require possible worlds to figure in their ontology. While acknowledging that their formal treatment allows for more elegant handling of things like discourse situations, etc. he feels they have not addressed the real problem, which for him involves rejecting the realist assumption that there is a reality independent of language use for language to map onto. For W. meaning is determined by use of language within a community, and language should be viewed as activity rather than description. He introduces 2 analaogies: (1) economics could suppose a value function which maps each object onto a real value and market activity could then be viewed as perturbations to the real value - W. suggests that a better perspective is to view value as determined by activities of buying and selling (2) relation of roads to terrain - terrain conditions road placement but does not determine it - road placement is more fundamentally determined by prior human needs and wants - who needs to go where. W. suggests situation semantics may be useful for describing increasingly more sophisticated artificial languages (e.g. computer languages) where the assumptions it makes about a neatly d ivided world existing independently of the language hold true.}, added-at = {2006-03-09T15:13:30.000+0100}, author = {Winograd, T.}, biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/24ae9b1689e36f57a63f67447dbbb1e48/diana}, description = {The big one}, interhash = {9fd30faef3300a1de301ae78e2a5244e}, intrahash = {4ae9b1689e36f57a63f67447dbbb1e48}, journal = {Linguistics and Philosophy}, keywords = {sem}, number = 1, pages = {91-104}, timestamp = {2006-03-09T15:13:30.000+0100}, title = {Moving the Semantic Fulcrum}, volume = 8, year = 1985 }