Beschreibung:
<jats:p>Situation semantics proposes novel and attractive treatments for several problem areas of natural language semantics, such as efficiency (context sensitivity) and prepositional attitude reports. Its focus on the information carried by utterances makes the approach very promising for accounting for pragmatic phenomena. However, situation semantics seems to oppose several basic assumptions underlying current approaches to natural language processing and the design of intelligent systems in general. It claims that efficiency undermines the standard notions of logical form, entailment, and proof theory, and objects to the view that mental processes necessarily involve internal representations. The paper attempts to clarify these issues and discusses the impact of situation semantics’ criticisms for natural language processing, knowledge representation, and reasoning. I claim that the representational approach is the only currently practical one for the design of large intelligent systems, but argue that the representations used should be efficient in order to account for the system's embedding in its environment. The paper concludes by stating some constraints that a computational interpretation of situation semantics should obey and discussing remaining problems.</jats:p>