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