From: tristan.wibberley+netnews2@alumni.manchester.ac.uk   
      
   On 01/02/2026 12:33, Richard Damon wrote:   
   > Your problem is you just don't understand what "semantics" actually mean.   
      
   I have a translation of Carnap (although the translator says he added   
   precision to Carnap's text).   
      
   That text says semantics is assigned to a system (using more verbiage   
   than "assigned").   
      
   Today, it seems to be ordinary to consider the deduction rules of a   
   syntactic system as a restricted form of semantics (as a common word for   
   the meaning of a formalisation). I wonder whether that's an influence of   
   popular programming languages that have equivalences classes defined and   
   used for optimisation, which is very much like having deduction rules   
   that assign some limited meaning, but because the languages have   
   operational semantics which can, in effect, subsume the optimisation,   
   the meaning is lumped in as part of the semantics.   
      
   I don't know whether Carnap's original 1950s German text was more vague   
   than the translation to accommodate the fact that deduction rules add   
   meaning of some kind.   
      
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   Tristan Wibberley   
      
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