A semantic device intended to capture the intuitive notion of a ‘state of affairs’, a ‘scene’, or a part of a possible world. As a semantic tool, situations were popularized by philosophers John Perry (1943– ) and Jon Barwise (1942–2000), who maintained that sets of situations (i.e., situation-types) gave an appropriate account of the referents of sentences. As semantic objects, situations were initially taken to differ from possible worlds only insofar as situations were incomplete, that is, for a situation $s$ there may exist sentences $\phi$ such that $s$ neither makes $\phi$ true nor makes $\phi$ false. The notion of a situation also allows for inconsistent states of affairs as well, e.g., the situation described by the sentence:

• • Sally is running and Sally is not running.

Situations have also been employed in semantics for relevant logics, in which case they are frequently regarded as states of information.