One of the principal claims made for situation semantics is that it can adequately account for the logic of human perception, particularly the logic of seeing. Since human perception is an area that appears to be nonobjective, Barwise and Perry’s claim is of special interest, since situation semantics is a version of objectivist semantics-a semantics where meaning is defined in terms of the capacity of symbols to fit the objective world directly, without the intervention of any human understanding that either goes beyond or does not accord with what is really “out there”. [...]There is one superficial similarity between situation semantics and theory of ICMs, which is set within Fauconnier’s (1985) theory of mental spaces. Both use partial models. But in the theory of ICMs, they are both cognitive and idealized. This means that (a) they are characterized relative to experiential aspects of human psychology and (b) they do not necessarily fit the external world “correctly”. Neither of these is true of situation semantics.A situation for Barwise and Perry is a partial model, which contains some entities and some specification of their properties and the relationships between them- what Barwise and Perry refer to as “the actual ‘common sense’ world that language reflects.[...] Within situation semantics, truth is defined with respect to situations and so is the concept of entailment. Situation semantics is an “objectivist” semantics: what’s there in the situation is really there in the world.
- Lakoff (1987), a pag.125