Multiple Object States

Alrighty, I'll give you all a quick rundown of the issue that I have.

I'm designing a platformer game and I have a character, lets call him Pete. Pete runs around, jumps, does other neat things and every frame updates his physics. At the moment, I am calling the functions "onGroundPhysics", "inAirPhysics" etc. Now, I plan on having multiple player "states", so that I can do various things to Pete while under the different states all by calling "updatePhysics" instead of all of the different ones.

I was thinking of superClasses, but that went out the backdoor (if the are different to regular classes, I have no idea how they work).

So basically, what I want is something like below:

onGround
{
    UpdatePhysics(params)
        doStuff
}

inAir
{
    UpdatePhysics(params)
        doStuff
}

This will give me a nice way to neaten up all of the code I have. What I've done so far is have a rather large series of nested if statements to choose which updatePhysics function is called.

I was thinking of having a scriptObject help do this by doing something like:

sObject.superClass = "onGround" | "inAir" | "otherStates"

function onGround::UpdatePhysics()

function inAir::UpdatePhysics()

...

Is this a *decent* way of doing things without true C++ superClass support?