chapter for the volume Introduction to the Philosophy of John Perry, ed. by Raphael van Riel and Albert NewenInternational audienceThis paper is an occasion to go back to Jon Barwise and John Perry's Situations and Attitudes (1983). The aim is to bring to the foreground the main tenets of situation semantics, and to give the reader with a fair sense of the theoretical motivations that were driving the framework, and that continue to be of major significance to Perry's larger philosophical enterprise. I start by rehearsing some of the central aspects of what can be described as the Fregean heritage, which is important in order to understand the context in which situation semantics saw light, and to appreciate the almost revolutionary nature of some of the ideas behind it. After having clarified the background, I turn to one of the main motivations behind situation semantics: the search for an account of meaning that relies upon an account of information, where the latter is crucially driven by the task of explaining how cognitive agents like us are led to act in ways they do, given how they are attuned to their environment
