Under Carnap's Lamp

One of the nice things about the Goguen/Carnap connection mentioned in my last post is that the aspect of Carnap it relates to is his central logical doctrines, rather than the more marginal phenomenalistic reductionism which has more often (in my acquaintance) been involved in recent attempts to build on or resurrect aspects of Carnap's philosophy.

I am still chasing the connections and finding more recent research which invokes Carnap's pluralism.  Admittedly the reference to Carnap is probably just that superficial; nothing more than Carnap's principle of tolerance is invoked.
However, that does not  mean that there is no more of interest in the research.
Certainly in the case of Institutions and their applications there is material which might prove useful to a contemporary philosopher engaged in a programme of research which had more in common with Carnap's work (which is what I suppose myself to be).

Anyway, Belnap is the next connection for the sake of his Under Carnap's Lamp: Flat pre-semantics.
As well as the connection (however tenuous) with Carnap, there is some connection here with my recent work on Grice's Vacuous names.
The connection is that the method I there adopt, the use of shallow embeddings, is intended to facilitate addressing semantic issues while side stepping the complexity of reasoning about syntax.

What Belnap calls "pre-semantics" is precisely that, the discussion of semantics with syntax excised.  Belnap talks as if this were more novel than it is, for this is one of the ideas which came from Scott and Strachey's work on the denotational semantics of programming languages.
They advocated considering semantic issues before syntactic ones (and did not see any difficulty in the use of the term "semantics" in this way).
The most conspicuously syntax detached semantic issues concerned what computer science then called "domain theory".

However, Belnap's speciality here is "flat", and I have not read far enough to get a decent handle on what he means by this or to understand the importance he attaches to it.  It seems to be connected with what he calls the relativity of the concept of truth, which seems to me an unfortunate way of talking about the handling of context in semantics.

RBJ

Carnap and Goguen

I was reflecting upon the poor quality of the Google alerts I get on Rudolf Carnap and wondering whether to scrap the alert when along came this gem which I am very very glad know about, and makes me happy to continue receiving a high proportion of garbage in my Google Carnap alerts.

While philosophers continue to have doubts about Carnap's pluralism, we have now had half a century of pluralism in Computer Science and Information Systems Engineering, in which domain there is a natural presumption that languages can be invented at will and on a pragmatic basis.
Up until now, I have not been aware of any recognition either in Computer Science or Philosophy of the connection between Carnap's philosophy and the culture of computing.  At last I have a paper making the connection, between the work of Carnap and that of one of the great theoreticians of pluralism (without the word) in computer science, Joseph Goguen, whose work has already contributed a great deal to my way of thinking about mathematics and computing.

Carnap Goguen and the Hyperontologies (by Kutze, Mossakowski and Lütze) is the paper which explicitly connects the work of Carnap and Goguen.  It seems to be principally from an AI/Semantic Web perspective, and so I will be very interested to discover whether this will help with my "X-Logic" ideas (for which semantic web is one motivator).
In this connection, Goguen's previous work on (logical) "Institutions" is relevant and it is of interest to me to discover where this has now lead, and to be able to consider more carefully how this relates to my present perspective.

More anon on "Carnapian Goguenism".

RBJ