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II. Carnap and Pseudoproblems

Auch wir haben "Bedürfnisse des Gemüts" in der Philosophie, aber die gehen auf
Klarheit der Begriffe, Sauberkeit der Methoden, Verantwortlichkeit der Thesen,
Leistung durch Zusammenarbeit, in die das Individuum sich einordnet.
Rudolf Carnap, Die logische Aufbau der Welt, 1928; epigraph in A Parting of
the
Ways: Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger, Michael Friedman, 2000

We too, have "emotional needs" in philosophy, but they are filled by clarity of
concepts, precision of methods, responsible theses, achievement through cooperation
in which each individual plays his part.
Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, translated by Rolf A.
George, 1967

1. What Carnap Wants to Do to Heidegger and Others

2. What Words and Sentences Mean
3. How to Reason One's Way to Meanings
4. Metaphysical Words Without Meanings
5. Carnap Confronts Heidegger

1. What Carnap Wants to Do to Heidegger and Others

1.1 At roughly the same time as Martin Heidegger was writing Sein und Zeit, Rudolf
Carnap was writing Die logische Aufbau der Welt. A few years later, in an article
called "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der
Sprache"(Erkenntnis II, 1932),Carnap used some passages from Heidegger's Was ist
Metaphysik? as an example of the use by some philosophers of what he called
metaphysical pseudo-statements. The article was translated into English by Arthur
Pap with the title. "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of
Language" (in Logical Positivism (1959), edited by Alfred Ayer). The passages by
Heidegger quoted by Carnap read in the translation by Pap:

What is to be investigated is being only and -- nothing else; being alone and nothing
further -- nothing; solely being, and beyond being -- nothing. What about this
Nothing? . . . Does the Nothing exist only because the Not, i.e. the Negation, exists?
Or is it the other way around? Does Negation and the Not exist only because the
Nothing exists? . . . We assert : the Nothing is prior to the Not and the Negation. . . .
Where do we seek the Nothing? How do we find the Nothing? . . . We know the
Nothing . . . Anxiety reveals the Nothing. . . . That for which and because of which
we were anxious, was 'really' -- nothing. Indeed : the Nothing itself -- as such -- was
present. . . . What about this Nothing? . . . The Nothing itself nothings.
Carnap proposes to show that forming such alleged pseudo-statements becomes
possible because of a logical defect of language.

1.2. In the translation of Was ist Metaphysik? by David Farrell Krell which appears in
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (1977), the passages quoted by Carnap read as
follows :

What should be examined are beings only, and besides that -- nothing; beings alone,
and further -- nothing; solely beings, and beyond that -- nothing. What about this
nothing? . . . Is the nothing given only because the "not", i.e., negation, is given? Or
is it the other way around? Are negation and the "not" given only because the nothing
is given? . . . We assert that the nothing is more original than the "not" and negation.
. . . Where shall we seek the nothing? Where will we find the nothing? . . . we do
know the nothing . . . Anxiety reveals the nothing. . . . that in the face of which and
for which we were anxious was "really" -- nothing. Indeed: the nothing itself -- as
such -- was there. . . . How is it with the nothing? . . . The nothing itself nihilates.

In the original German, from Wegmarken (1978, 2nd edition; 1st was 1967), the
passages are :

Erforscht werden soll nur das Seiende und sonst -- nichts; das Seiende allein und
weiter -- nichts; das Seiende einzig and darüber hinaus -- nichts. Wie steht es um
dieses Nichts? . . . Gibt es das Nichts nur, weil es das Nicht, d. h. die Verneinung
gibt? Oder liegt es umgekehrt? Gibt es die Verneinung und das Nicht nur, weil es das
Nichts gibt? . . . Wir behaupten das Nichts ist unsprünglicher als das Nicht und die
Verneinung. . . . wir kennen das Nichts . . . Die Angst offenbart das Nichts . . .
wovor and worum wir uns ängsteten, war "eigentlich" -- nichts. In der Tat: das Nichts
selbst -- als solches -- war da. . . . Wie steht es um das Nichts? . . . Das Nichts
selbst nichtet.

1.3. In German, "nothing" is das Nichts (noun) or nichts (adverb), and das Nicht
(noun), translated by Krell as "the 'not' " correlates with nicht, "not" (adverbs).
Heidegger indicates that he is using das Nicht as a synonym for Verneinung,
"negation", "saying no to", or (to coin a word) "not-ing" (not "noting", from note, but
"not-ing", from not), and presumably not as a synonym for Vernichtung, which can be
translated by "annihilation", "destruction", "extermination", etc., depending (as usual)
on context. Not-ing is saying or thinking "not", as in "Heidegger is not here" or
"Heidegger was not all there", or symbolically as in the logical formula ~(~p) = p,
i.e., negation of negation of a proposition p gets us back to the proposition p we
started with. It will give some idea of one of the difficulties which arise in connection
with terms of this sort can be seen by contrastinh how negation of negation (double
negation) works in formal logic versus how it works in everyday English. The
statement p = "He cannot do nothing" will, according to common usage, usually be
taken to mean the same as q = "He cannot not do something", so let's try setting set p
= q, where "=" translates as "has the same meaning as" (this assumes we have in mind
some meaning for "meaning"). (Actually, "He can't do nothing" often is taken to
mean something more like "He must do something", in which there has been a shift
from the modal "can" to the modal "must", but I will ignore this complication).
Suppose now we try to construct English versions of the double negations of p and of
q by extending the use and interpretation of the negation sign ~ as follows. Let's
imagine moving the negation sign ~ from left to right through q, and whenever we get
to a "not" in the English substitution for q, we erase the "not", and then stop using the
sign ~ for that pass. Then for ~q, we get "He can not do something", by erasing the
first "not" in "He cannot not do something". Applying the same rule again to ~q, we
get ~(~q) = "He can do something". On the other, doing this for p, we get for ~p "He
can do nothing", and for ~(~p) we get -- well, we get "He can do hing", and "hing" is
not an English word. Something has gone wrong. Several possible moves occur to
me which might remedy this situation, but let this serve as a wake-up call to
investigate how dealing with negations and nothings can lead to curious results. For
example, we might argue that "hing" in English doesn't mean anything, so it means
nothing. But aside from this being a possibly irritating little joke, if we did this we
would get ~(~p) = "He can do nothing", so ~(~p) = ~p, To make matters even more
complicated, in some contexts and some dialects in English, "He can't do nothing" is
customarily taken to mean "He cannot do anything". Also, the use of double
negatives is different in different languages. In Spanish, for example, the double
negative in "Él no puede hacer nada" translates as "He cannot do anything" in the
sense of "He cannot act", not as the more literal "He cannot do nothing" in the sense
of "He can (ought to, must) act".

1.4. I note that in the English language, besides being used as an adverb or an
(apparent) noun, the term "nothing" can also be classified as a pronoun, where it may
be taken to stand for "no thing", as in one interpretation of "the dead feel nothing".
Here we don't intend to say that the dead feel (or feel something), nor do we intend to
name an entity or a nonentity that the dead feel. We may take it that here "nothing" is
used as a noun-like word in place of a noun, i.e. as a pronoun, and that the sentence
"the dead feel nothing" means the same as the sentence "the dead do not feel".
However, "nothing" might also be taken in some contexts as a noun or name for, "no
thing", where "no thing" is taken to mean "something other than a thing", the term
"thing" having been previous been restricted to refer to physical objects (defined in
some way) or to phenomena of some specified kind. I note in passing that "nothing"
is sometimes used misleadingly to refer to the number (or numeral) zero, but while
this involves another story Also "nothing" may be used as an adjective, as in "that
nothing statement", where "nothing" means something like "worthless". Or the term
"nothing" may be used to mean "something that doesn't exist", as in "the primeval
nothing", which might be used when talking about a creation ex nihilo, which means
-- well, it means a creation out of nothing.

1.5. It appears to be easier in English translations than it is in the original German to

wonder if Heidegger is involved with a pun on the term "nothing", viz., merging
"nothing" with "no-thing", i.e. "no thing", and with "not a thing", and also with what
I have called not-ing, negation. From this standpoint, it appears that Heidegger might
be interpreted as saying something like this: Being (Sein mit Temporalität) (or Is-
ingness as I have called it) is different from being and beings (Seiende, Seiendes,
Seienden, etc.), since Being is in no way an instance of the things or beings or kind of
being we experience in our everyday lives as or by way of Dasein (maybe in the
manner of Heidegger, we should coin "by way of Daseiende", i.e., "being-in-the-
world-ing"). It is likely too naive to suggest that Heidegger is saying that the things
(whatever they are) of our everyday lives are perceivable and conceivable by humans,
perhaps in some Kantian manner, but Being, like Kant's noumenon, cannot be
perceived or conceived in such a manner, and must be disclosed or open up to us in
some other way to or because of our Dasein, our daily being, our being-here-and-
there. That would be rather a commonplace claim, theologically speaking. Or is he
perhaps elevating the negation maneuvers present in languages and logics into a
device for annihilating Being and Time as they have been presented by
metaphysicians up to his time, and getting at a new Being and Time (or an ancient
Greek original Being and Time) to replace older and (he hopes) obsolete Beings and
Times?

1.6. On the other hand, so far as Heidegger having been affected by formal logic (or
any other kind of logic) in his use of das Nicht or die Verneinung, Vincent Vycinas
says in Earth and Gods, referring to what Heidegger says in Was ist Metaphysik? :

Heidegger thinks Being. Being cannot be thought logically. In its primary phase
logic was a thinking interpretation of the experience of Being; but from the time of
Aristotle, logic degenerated into an instrument which is no longer related to Being,
but "binds itself to the calculation of beings only and exclusively serves them alone."
Heidegger transcends logic in the traditional sense, because he thinks Being and not
of beings.

1.7. The battle is joined. According to the interpretation of Vycinas, Heidegger says
that thinking Being is not done rationally, if one considers that what is rational must
involve use of some kind of logic of the sorts that have descended from that described
in Aristotle's Organon. And in fact, in What is Metaphysics? (as translated by Krell),
Heidegger says :

Are we allowed to tamper with the rule of "logic"? Isn't intellect the taskmaster in
this question of the nothing? Only with its help can we at all define the nothing and
pose it as a problem -- which, it is true, only devours itself. For the nothing is the
negation of the totality of beings; it is nonbeing pure and simple. . . . Is the nothing
given only because the "not," i.e., negation, is given ? Or is it the other way around?
Are negation and the "not" given only because the nothing is given? . . . We assert
that the nothing is more original than the "not" and negation.

Heidegger seems here to be proposing that people would never have able to negate in
languages if there weren't a referent, or at least a sense, which can be attached to the
word or concept of das Nichts, "the Nothing", or "Nothingness".

1.8. Talking about Being cannot be done without using language, says Heidegger. If
talking is defined to be use of language, this is OK, since it is tautologous. But
according to Heidegger (and mystics) language -- at least ordinary (daseinische?)
language -- gets in the way of disclosure of Being (Is-ingness), though Heidegger has
argued that the language of certain poets (especially German poets) can provide a
path to thinking Being. On the other hand, Vycinas has a footnote in which he advises
against saying in English "thinking of Being", or the like, to indicate what Heidegger
is driving at, since Heidegger doesn't have some kind of subject-object relationship in
mind. It seems rather that what Heidegger wants is a unio mystica, a kind of
communion with a non-deistic and non-theological but God-like Being.

2. What Words and Sentences Mean

2.1. In the light (or darkness) of this discussion of Heidegger's use of nothing, I turn
now to a consideration of Carnap's arguments against the propriety of Heidegger's use
of language when he does metaphysics. Carnap says, in Pap's translation: "A
language consists of a vocabulary and a syntax, i.e. a set of words which have
meanings and rules of sentence formation." Sentences, or statements, are sequences
of words. What are words, and what are meanings of words? Carnap says:

The researches of applied logic or the theory of knowledge, which aim at clarifying
the cognitive content of scientific statements and thereby the meanings of the terms
that occur in the statements, by means of logical analysis, lead to a positive result and
to a negative result. The positive result is worked out in the domain of empirical
science; the various concepts of the various branches of science are clarified; their
formal-logical and epistemological connections are made explicit. In the domain of
metaphysics, including all philosophy of value and normative theory, logical analysis
yields the negative result that the alleged statements are entirely meaningless."

In the original German, this passage reads as follows:

Die Untersuchungen der "angewandten Logik" oder "Erkenntnistheorie", die sich die
Aufgabe stellen, durch Logische Analyse der Erkenntnisgehalt der wissenschaftlichen
Sätze und damit die Bedeutung der in den Sätzen auftretenden Wörter ("Begriffe")
klarzustellen, führen zu einem positiven and zu einem negativen Ergebnis. Das
positive Ergebnis wird auf dem Gebiet der Empirischen Wissenschaft erarbeitet; die
einzelnen Begriffe der verschiedenen Wissenschaftszweige werden geklärt; ihr
formal-logischer and erkenntnistheoretischer Zusammenhang wird aufgewiesen. Aus
dem Gebiet der Metaphysik (einschliesslich aller Wertphilosophie und
Normwissenschaft) führt die logische Analyse zu dem negativen Ergebnis, dass die
vorgeblichen Sätze dieses Gebietes gänzlich sinnlos sind.

2.2. In this passage Pap translates "der in den Sätzen auftretenden Wörter
("Begriffe")" as "the terms which occur in the statements", thus rendering "Wörter"
("Begriffe") by "terms". (It is notably awkward to say that Pap translated the words
Wörter ("Begriffe") by the word "terms", or by the term "terms".) Elsewhere, Pap
translates "Wörter" by "words". I conjecture that by using "terms" instead of "words
(concepts)", Pap might have intended to capture Carnap's easy identification of words
with concepts. This identification might be taken to be a weakness, insofar as
relations of words to concepts have been for a long time much debated not only by
philosophers, but by linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, literary theorists,
and others. At the beginning of his Aufbau, Carnap makes a similar kind of
identification. Having defined object as "anything about which a statement can be
made", he without comment uses the term "concept" where one would expect him to
use the term "object" which he has just defined. On this point, Alan W. Richardson
says in his book Carnap's Construction of the World (1998) (following Michael
Friedman, Richardson translates the word konstruieren as "to constitute" rather than
following Rolf A. George who used "to construct" in his translation of the Aufbau) :

It may seem that Carnap is sloppily moving back and forth between the view that
objects are constituted and the view that concepts are constituted in these passages.
In a sense, he is doing just that, but he will soon argue that it is a matter of
indifference just how one expresses this point: "Fundamentally it isn't at all a matter
of the different views, rather only of two different interpretative modes of speech."
What matters for Carnap is not the domain of constitution, but constitution itself. His
primary goal is to demarcate the philosophical difference between what he calls
constitution and both realistic and idealistic conceptions of concept formation or
object construction. The important difference is that constitution is a purely logical
relation.

2.3. In this regard, in his article "Carnap's Aufbau Reconsidered" (1987), Michael
Friedman argues that a fundamental aim of Carnap's was to point the way to a
construction "of all concepts of science through purely structural definite
descriptions." Friedman observes that the method which Carnap has in mind for this
elimination is that of implicit definition. This is a technique made familiar to
mathematicians by David Hilbert in his Grundlagen der Geometrie, first edition
1899. It is explained as follows by Paul Bernays in his article "Hilbert's significance
for the philosophy of mathematics" (1922) :

Reliance on spatial representation is completely avoided here, not

only in the proofs but also in the axioms and the concepts. The
words "point," "line," "plane" serve only as names for three different
sorts of objects, about which nothing else is assumed directly
except that the objects of each sort constitute a fixed determinate
system. Any further characterization is carried out only through the
axioms. In the same way, expressions [such as] "the point A lies on
the line a" or "the point A lies between B and C" will not be
associated with the usual intuitive meanings; rather these
expressions will designate only certain, at worst indeterminate,
relations, which are implicitly characterized only through the axioms
in which these expressions occur. [Author's Footnote: One speaks in this
sense of implicit definition.]

According to this conception, the axioms are in no way judgments

that can be said to be true or false; they have a sense only in the
context of the whole axiom system. And even the axiom system as
a whole does not constitute the statement of a truth; rather, the
logical structure of axiomatic geometry in Hilbert's sense --
analogously to that of abstract group theory -- is a purely
hypothetical one. If there are anywhere in reality three systems of
objects, as well as determinate relations between these objects,
such that the axioms of geometry hold of them (this means that by
an appropriate assignment of names to the objects and relations,
the axioms turn into true statements), then all theorems of
geometry hold of these objects and relationships as well. Thus the
axiom system itself does not express something factual; rather, it
presents only a possible form of a system of connections that must
be investigated mathematically according to its internal properties.
Accordingly, the axiomatic treatment of geometry consists in
separating the purely mathematical part of knowledge from
geometry, considered as a science of spatial figures, and
investigating it on its own in isolation. The spatial relationships are,
as it were, projected into the sphere of the mathematical-abstract in
which the structure of their connections appears as an object of
pure mathematical, thought. This structure is subjected to a mode
of investigation that concentrates only on the logical relations and is
indifferent to the question of the factual truth, that is, the question
whether the geometrical connections determined by the axioms are
found in reality (or even in our spatial intuition).

This sort of interpretation of the axiomatic method presented in

Hilbert's "Foundations of Geometry" offered the particular
advantage of not being restricted to geometry but of being directly
applicable to other disciplines. From the beginning, Hilbert
envisaged the point of view of the uniformity of the axiomatic
method in its application to the most diverse domains, and guided
by this viewpoint, he tried to bring this method to bear as widely as
possible. In particular, he succeeded in grounding axiomatically the
kinetic theory of gases as well as the elementary theory of radiation
in a rigorous way.

2.4. I infer, provisionally, that we may take it that if Carnap's program could be
carried out, then it would make no logical difference whether the instances of
variables (objects, elements of domains) in his purely logical statements of relations
are interpreted as words, considered as consisting of sequences of sounds or signs
(symbols, characters, hand gestures, etc.), or as concepts which these sequences
represent or trigger in minds or brains. Nor will it make any difference what the
ontological status of such concepts may be, such as, for example, Platonic ideals or
Kantian constructions or Husserlian phenomena or sense data or neural states.
However, for scientific purposes, the words used would have to be in some way
traceable to or derivable from (human) experiences. This, I take it, is an important
feature of Carnap's claim in his Erkenntnis article to have found a method of
eliminating metaphysics. From this point of view, one might think of the first phrase
of the title, "Überwindung der Metaphysik", as being translated by "Overcoming of
Metaphysics" rather than "Elimination of Metaphysics". Thus one can speculate that
Carnap's program, if it could be carried out, might provide a method for dealing
rationally (logically) with metaphysical views as well as physical or
phenomenological views, although what Carnap comes to call meaningless words
would occur in metaphysical statements; roughly speaking, these would be words or
terms (especially nouns) which could not be traceable to, or derivable from, certain
basic sentences based on intersubjective human experiences, i.e. experiences which
are potentially open to all (unimpaired) humans. However, there are certain parts of
traditional metaphysics which would be eliminated according to Carnap's scheme,
namely those statements which are syntactically ill-formed, as discussed below.

2.6. Hilbert's technique has been forcefully criticized in various ways, for example
by Gottlob Frege. In the Hilbert procedure, such terms (or logical variables) as
"point" and "line" are called undefined terms. These terms are said to be implicitly
defined by axioms, axioms being statements of some sort of pure logic which
prescribe the rules for manipulating these terms in the particular system (or model) at
hand, such as euclidean geometry (using real numbers), or one of the non-euclidean
geometries, or arithmetic. In this regard, when I taught geometry of various kinds, I
used to tell students that one can say that if we interpret points as, say, astronomical
objects, and lines as (straight) light beams, then we can try applying Hilbert's axioms
to stars, planets, comets, meteors, etc., and to (non-relativistic) beams of light.
However, I told them that, while this may be rather charming to think about, they
won't get very far in the study of geometry unless they interpret (or visualize or intuit)
points as little bitty marks (maybe even 0-dimensional), and (straight) lines as edges
of tables (maybe infinite in length, or at least always extendable), or as some
abstractions or idealizations corresponding to such interpretations (perhaps, as one
says, interpretations in one's mind, as contrasted with what we see, feel, etc.) If it is
fair to say that something along these lines is what Frege meant by defining such
terms as "point" and "line" before they are used in axioms, then I suppose I am
agreeing with Frege in his criticism of Hilbert's proposal for founding geometry and
other scientific enterprises. Still, it was very pleasant to be able to avoid getting into
frustrating discussions about what points and lines really (or ideally) are by asking
students to simply ignore such philosophical problems for purposes of doing
geometry in the way mathematicians do, and just to be sure that they only use the
terms in the way prescribed by the axioms and subsequent theorems, using valid
maneuvers of (standard, Aristotelian) logic, so far as they could detect such valid
maneuvers without much study of formal logic (but with some study of such logic).

2.7. In my experience, most mathematicians other than some working in foundations

of mathematics make a philosophically crude distinction between implicit and explicit
definitions. A term is taken as implicitly defined if it appears in a set of axioms, and if
no statements about what the term signifies are taken explicitly into account in
deriving theorems from these axioms. However, it is clear enough that in practice,
one cannot avoid taking some kind of significations of the term into account if the
term has agreed on significations in ordinary language. Mathematicians often speak
of such significations has having intuitive meaning, without trying to explain what
they mean by intuition. A term is said to be explicitly defined if it is satisfactorily
introduced by statements which only depend on previously defined terms in some
logically and grammatically satisfactory or acceptable way .

2.8. It appears that in his Aufbau, Carnap aimed to lay down a scheme for making
scientific statements depend only on their logical form, in some way independent of
what the names of objects -- the names of objects -- which occurred as instances or
substitutions in these statements were interpreted, so long as in some way the objects
were traceable to or were founded on (human) objective or empirical experiences, of
the sort that can be shared among (unimpaired) humans . For example, objects could
be interpreted as physical entities in some objective or intersubjective way, or as
concepts of some kind derived from intersubjective experiences, or as words with
sharable meanings, or as being derivable from some basic physical or mental entities
of this sort, to which words refer. I note that this leaves open the possibility that one
might apply Carnap's proposed scheme for intersubjective experiences to subjective
or presumably private experiences, which would seem to let his system, if successful,
be applicable to metaphysical and/or theological experiences or concepts. However,
passing this by for the time being, and confining ourselves (hopefully) to
intersubjective experiences or concepts, it appears that at least for purposes of
communication, words must be used, so to find allowable words, i.e. words with
(sharable) meanings, it will be desirable to distinguish words with meanings from
meaningless words.

2.9. It seems that Carnap has, without mentioning it, restricted himself to words
(terms) which appear in written form. He makes no mention of the kind of
distinctions one makes between spoken words and written words, between speech
acts and written acts (or writing as result of acts), nor does he speak about the use of
facial expressions and body movements, or different stresses on some particular
sounds in spoken language conveying different meanings, and whatever else goes
with spoken language. Nor does he take into account here, in connection with written
words, uses of punctuation or other written symbols as conveying or affecting
meanings of words. Nothing is said about meanings which can be conveyed or
triggered by symbols or activities other than words, e.g., graphs, private or public
images or pictures, sign languages for the deaf, blinking lights, private or public
moving objects, etc. In short, it appears that Carnap has in mind construction (or
constitution, as some say) of a language, a method of recording and communicating,
with units of meaning of a special kind. What kind of units of meaning?

2.10. Carnap starts with units he calls Wörter, i.e. words, and he proceeds by
showing how he proposes one should go about finding a meaning for the word
"stone". The quotes here may be taken to indicate that "stone" should be interpreted
orthographically, and that we should suspend questions of meaning, so far as possible,
and concentrate on the string of symbols, which here are five letters in a certain
alphabet. This is somewhat what one does when looking the term up in a dictionary.
I do not intend to use a dictionary to find an authoritative meaning for the string
"stone", but I will trust a competent lexicographer to have recorded some ordinary or
technical or colloquial or metaphorical or obsolete usages he or she has found. As far
as I can see, and as I will talk about later, to find a meaning for a word by Carnap's
method, I have to start with some notion of how the word has been applied. In a
certain unabridged Merriam-Webster dictionary published in the year 2000, a version
of which I have loaded into my computer, the word "stone", taken as a noun (and not
a verb or adjective or adverb, which I also could do) is defined as follows :

1 : a concretion of earthy or mineral matter of igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic

origin: a (1) : such a concretion of indeterminate size or shape : BOULDER,
PEBBLE *stones rolling down the hill* *gathering stones on the beach* (2) : the
substance of this concretion : ROCK *the mountain is solid stone* *trees turned to
stone in the petrified forest* b : such a concretion mined, quarried, or shaped in a
definite form or size or for a specified function: as (1) : a building block *demolish
the structure a stone at a time* (2) : a paving block : COBBLESTONE *building
barricades of the very stones of the streets* (3) : a precious stone : GEM (4) : a
mineral matter used for a particular ornamental or commercial purpose *ornaments
made of the rarer stones * banded slate, rose quartz, steatite American Guide Series:
New Jersey* (5) : a pillar or block of stone set as a monument or sign; especially :
GRAVESTONE *the burying ground, where you can find the stones of veterans of
the Revolution J.P.Marquand* (6) : a rounded missile fired from an arm or a sling
*six stones for his sling* (7) : a shaped piece of rock used in a feat of strength (as
curling) (8) : MILLSTONE (9) : GRINDSTONE (10) : WHETSTONE (11) : a stand
or table with a smooth flat top on which to impose or set type called also surface (12)
: a surface upon which a drawing, text, or design to be lithographed is drawn or
transferred (13) : a watch jewel
2 : something resembling a small stone or pebble in shape, composition, or hardness:
as a (1) : CALCULUS 1a (2) : a hard natural growth (as an otolith) found in an
animal b : TESTIS c : HAILSTONE d (1) : the hard central portion of a drupaceous
fruit (as a peach) (2) : a hard stonelike seed (as of a date)
3 plural usually stone : any of various units of weight ranging from 4 to 26 pounds: as
a : an official British unit equal to 14 pounds b : a British unit for meat equal to 8
pounds called also Smithfield stone
4 : any of the colors common in stone or weathered rock see DEEP STONE, HONEY
6, LIGHT STONE, STONE GRAY
5 : CHINA STONE, CORNISH STONE
6 : a small crystalline contamination in glass comprising unmelted batch material or a
particle of the melting vessel
7 : a playing piece used in backgammon

2.11. The capitalized terms in the above definition give computer links to other terms
in the dictionary. I ask now, in what way can the first criterion given by Carnap for
the meaning of a word be interpreted as applying to some part of this dictionary
definition? The criterion appears not to be applicable at all as it stands, since in order
for a meaning of a word to be arrived at, one must first have imbedded the word in
what Carnap calls an elementary sentence (Elementarsatz). In the present case, the
elementary sentence given by Carnap translates as "x is a stone". I will now entertain
for a moment the conjecture that one might be able to determine a meaning for a word
without embedding it in a sentence (statement, proposition), and thus avoid starting
off with a dictionary definition. One way might be to use verbal association, i.e. by
seeing what other words or phrases or sentences occur to a person when a given word
is presented to this person. Although this recalls the word association tests used by
psychoanalysts, I don't intend such associations to be interpreted as subconsciously
generated or to be generated as quickly as possible -- any kind of unassisted
generation will do, whatever any particular psychological or physiological theory
may say about how the generation occurs. In such an exercise, one will not be
determining a meaning of the sort one may find from a dictionary definition (unless,
perhaps, one is engaging in lexicography). Still, there is a kind of relationship
between a word and what is associated with this word by a person in this way.

2.12. So here goes, with me as the person associating with the word stone: hard,
pebble, throw, hit, hurt, watch out, gravel, driveway, gullets of some birds, minerals,
collecting . . . . . I will stop here. A moment ago, the word stone triggered in me
certain responses. I will now repeat the exercise for stone: hard, minerals, stalactite,
amazonite, stone cold dead in the market, rolling stones, punishment by stoning . . . .
. I have generated a different list, although a couple of terms occur in both lists.
These lists are peculiar to me at this place and time, and if another person performs a
similar maneuver (especially without having seen my results above recently), the
chances are very good that quite different lists will be generated. It is amusing for me
to speculate that the terms minerals and collecting in the first list, and the name
amazonite in the second list, were generated by me because at one time I was an avid
mineral collector. The occurrence of stalactite in the second list might have been
triggered because I was wondering for an instant whether or not a stalactite qualifies
as a stone or not, a question I would be tempted to answer by looking at the dictionary
definition of "stone" I gave, and comparing it with the definition of "stalactite" in that
dictionary. I wouldn't be overly trustful of the result, though, since a look into some
geological treatises might reveal to me that certain experts have had an attitude
different from the one the lexicographers who compiled that dictionary had. My
dictionary defines "stalactite" as a deposit of calcium carbonate resembling an icicle.
Here is a definition of "stalactite" from a glossary of geological terms found on the
Internet: "A mineral deposit (speleothem) which hangs downwards from a roof or
wall of a cave." A "speleothem" is defined as: "A deposit formed in caves when
calcium carbonate (CaCO3) or some other mineral precipitates from drips or thin
films of water." Now the dictionary definition of "stone" I gave above has as a
primary meaning for this term: "a concretion of earthy or mineral matter of igneous,
sedimentary, or metamorphic origin." (The geological glossary does not give a
definition of "stone", which suggests that the geologist(s) who compiled it didn't
regard "stone" as a technical term used by geologists). So, given that "precipitation"
is a kind of "sedimentation", and given that we trust the dictionary and glossary I
used, we may conclude that a stalactite is a stone, or that "stalactite" is a name for a
kind of stone. However, I can imagine a person saying "I don't care what your
dictionaries and glossaries say, I don't call a stalactite a kind of stone." What do I do
then? (I will drop this line of thought.)

2.13. To get back to finding meanings by word association, the term stalactite may
have occurred to me in connection with the word "stone" because I was moved to
think of some names of minerals, and the pronunciation of the term "stalactite"
sounded (within me, somehow) like the name of a mineral. In fact, immediately after
I listed stalactite, the question flashed in me of how legitimate it was to think of a
stalactite as a stone, so I next recalled what I was (and still am) sure is the name of a
mineral, viz. "amazonite". I will refrain from further analysis of my lists, and ask
myself whether or not this technique has yielded some kind of meaning (to me, at
least) of the term "stone". My answer is, yes, something about the meaning of this
word, for me, has been revealed to me. However, this technique will not do for the
sort of thing Carnap evidently has in mind. Why not? For one thing, such lists are
not time invariant, even for one and the same person. For another, they are not
person invariant, and will vary from person to person. I take it that the kind of
meaning for a term that Carnap has in mind must be both time and person invariant,
something objective or at least intersubjective. Now to start finding a meaning for
"stone" using Carnap's procedure, I am asked by him to imbed the word in the
elementary sentence "x is a stone", and then to consider replacements for x until I find
a sentence which tells me how to empirically or phenomenologically verify that some
object or phenomenon I want to characterize is in fact a stone. There are a lot of
possible substitutions for x, so, as I will discuss below, it seems desirable to restrict
myself just to a limited number of them. Here I want to point out that my decision to
start with a dictionary definition of stone rather than some other way was in part
motivated by a desire to get some idea of how the word "stone" has been used by lots
of people, in line with what Carnap's desire to have a shared or shareable meaning for
the word.

2.14. For a while now there has been bubbling in my mind a consciousness that what
I've been doing is the sort of thing Ludwig Wittgenstein did, so I got hold of a copy of
G. E. M. Anscombe's translation of Wittgenstein's Philosophische Untersuchungen,
his Philosophical Investigations (1945-1949). I was taken aback to find that what
I've been doing is rather startlingly similar to what Wittgenstein does there in the first
several pages. I hadn't looked into the Philosophical Investigations for many years,
but aside from what I may have remembered from that work by direct contact a long
time ago, as the years went by I must surely have been indirectly affected by what's
there, in view of the widespread influence that work has had among philosophers and
some others. In any case, I got to speculating about the fact that I was led to my
comments about language by trying to understand what Carnap meant by the
meaning of a word in his article published in 1932, and I recalled that in a footnote of
this article, he refers the reader for fuller explanations to his own work, Der logische
Aufbau der Welt (edition of 1928), and also to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logische-
Philosophicus (1922). Now, Wittgenstein says in his preface (1945) to the
Philosophical Investigations that he has "been forced to recognize grave mistakes in
what he wrote" in the Tractatus. So it appears that in reading Carnap's article, I was
affected indirectly by Wittgenstein's Tractatus of 1922 (which I also hadn't looked at
in quite a few years) by way of certain of Carnap's views in 1932 about his
construction of a special kind of clarified languages, which he says he based to some
degree on Wittgenstein's Tractatus of 1922; and it appears that my response to
Carnap's views (in the year 2005) has been affected, again probably mainly indirectly,
by Wittgenstein's later views of 1945 about his own Tractatus of 1922, although I
expect I was also affected by my own experiences with languages over a period of
nearly 80 years.

2.15. I return now to the question of how Carnap proposes, in the article under
consideration, to assign a meaning to a word. In his article on the elimination of
metaphysics, Carnap says, in the translation by Arthur Pap :

What stipulation concerning a word must be made in order for it to be significant. . .

. First, the syntax of the word must be fixed, i.e. the mode of its occurring in the
simplest sentence form in which it is capable of occurring; we call this sentence form
its elementary sentence. The elementary form for the word "stone" e.g. is "x is a
stone"; in sentences of this form some designation from the category of things
occupies the place of "x," e.g. "this diamond," "this apple." Secondly, for an
elementary sentence S containing the word an answer must be given to the following
question, which can be formulated in various ways :
(1.) What sentences is S deducible from, and what sentences are deducible from S?
(2.) Under what conditions is S supposed to be true, and under what conditions
false?
(3.) How is S to be verified?
(4.) What is the meaning of S?

Carnap regards these formulations as in some way saying the same thing in different
terms, with phraseology peculiar to different fields of study. I will return to this
point, but first I will examine what he has said so far. In the original German, this
passage reads :

Welche Festsetzung müssen in bezug auf ein Wort getroffen sein, damit es eine
Bedeutung hat? . . . Erstens muss die Syntax des Wortes festliegen, d. h. die Art
seines Auftretens in der einfachsten Satzform, in der es vorkommen kann; wir nennen
diese Satzform seinen Elementarsatz. Die elementare Satzform dieser Form steht an
Stelle von "x" irgendeine Bezeichnung aus der Kategorie der Dinge, z. B. "dieser
Diamant", "dieser Apfel". Zweitens muss für den Elementarsatz S des betreffenden
Wortes die Antwort auf folgende Frage gegeben sein, die wie in vershiedener Weise
formulieren können :
1. Aus was für Sätzen ist S ableitbar, and welche Sätze sind aus S ableitbar?
2. Unter welchen Bedingungen soll S wahr, unter welchen falsch sein?
3. Wie ist S zu verifizieren?
4. Welchen Sinn hat S?

2.16. Carnap says that to specify the meaning of a word, one must first form an
elementary sentence in which the word occurs. He does not give in this article a
characterization of the term "elementary sentence", but instead gives an example of
how one may proceed. He says that "x is a stone" is an elementary sentence for the
word (or concept, or thing) "stone". In "x is a stone", the "x" may be replaced by
"some designation from the category of things". This last is the translation by Pap.
The original German is "irgendeine Bezeichnung aus der Kategorie der Dinge". Pap
translates Bezeichnung with "designation". However, alternative translations are
"name" or "term". With this in mind, one can interpret Carnap's statement as
equivalent to saying that one can replace "x" by the name of, or term for, or concept
of, some thing, or, it appears, one can replace "x" by the thing itself, if one is
comfortable with speaking about things in themselves, independent of perceptions or
conceptions. No criteria for a sentence being elementary are given, and one might
provisionally conclude that it is a matter of grammar, e.g. the "x" should be the
subject in a sentence, and the "stone" (in his example) should be a predicate. Or,
using a symbolic notation, we are considering a sentence function (propositional
function) of the form S(x), where S = "stone" (or just S = stone, if we are thinking of
some sort of physical object, rather than a name for that object), and the x comes from
some domain (as mathematicians frequently call it), in this case the domain of
"Dinge", i.e. things, or objects, or names for things or objects. From this point

2.17. Carnap says that once one has an elementary sentence function S(x) of this sort,
we can ask for an answer to a question which can be formulated in four different
ways, as listed above. Of these, he says that the first version is the correct one; the
second version uses the phraseology of logic; the third uses that of epistemology; and
the fourth uses what he calls "philosophy", by which he indicates he intends
phenomenology (without further qualification). The first version speaks of what is
deducible from and (so to speak) deducible to an elementary sentence S, resulting
from a suitable substitution for x in S(x). By deducible to, I intend to speak of that
which S can be deduced from, which I take it must be other sentences, be they
elementary or not. I take it that when Carnap uses the word "word" (Wort) here, he
doesn't mean an orthographic word, one which, when written as a sequence of
characters of the English language, such as letters, numerals and hyphens, is provided
with blank spaces on each end, and has no blank spaces in the sequence of
characters. For example, such strings of characters as "look up" or "think tank" can
be referred to by the word "word". They are treated as such in sufficiently detailed
dictionaries. This suggests thinking of a word as a lexical item, i.e. an orthographic
word or a sequence of orthographic words which can appear as a definiendum
(something to be defined) in, say, an unabridged dictionary of the English language,
together with a definiens or some number of definientia (statements giving the
meaning(s) of the word). This may be too broad for present purposes, since we may
want to exclude grammatical terms (sometime called function terms), such as "the" or
"of" which, it seems, cannot be given dictionary definitions of the sort nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs can, and which present special difficulties in translating to and
from one natural language to another. In this connection I note that if I were working
in some other language, say Chinese for example, I would have to talk about words
differently. This is obvious enough with regard to written Chinese, but even English
and German have different ways of forming words, which show up when translating
from one of these languages to the other.

2.18. It appears at first sight that Carnap was not thinking about relations of
dictionary definitions to his notion of word meanings, since he starts not with a word
by itself, but with a word imbedded in a propositional function. As an example, he
gives "x is a stone", where for purposes of testing, x may be replaced by other words
such as, he says, "this diamond" and "this apple", yielding the propositions "this
diamond is a stone" and "this apple is a stone". He thus appears to be restricting
values of x to a domain of nouns or names, and moreover, I suspect, to names of
specific physical objects given ostensively. That is, he uses "this diamond", and not
"diamond", which would yield "diamond is a stone". This last could be taken to refer
to all possible diamonds, or some sort of metaphysical essence of diamond, whereas
"this stone" suggests someone pointing to a specific object, and indeed a single
specific object.

2.19. The first criterion Carnap gives for determining the meaning of the word
"stone" by using a proposition like "this diamond is a stone" or "this apple is a stone"
is to see what propositions can such a proposition be derived (deduced) from, and
what propositions can be derived from such a proposition. Proceeding further,
Carnap says that for many words, and for the overwhelming majority of scientific
words, their meanings can be specified by "reduction to other words", and he gives
this process two names, constitution and definition. In the original, he speaks of
"Zurückführung auf andere Wörter ("Konstitution", Definition)". Here
"Zurückführung auf" can be translated more literally as "leading back to", although
another possibility, in some contexts, is "affiliation with" or "association with". The
reason Konstitution appears in quotes in evidently because this term is used by
Carnap in a special sense, to refer to a basic method which he has put forward in his
Aufbau. To give an example of this process, Carnap does not use his previous
example, "x is a stone", but rather "the thing x is an arthropod" (not "x is arthropod"
nor "this thing is an arthropod", but let this pass). He claims that "the thing x is an
arthropod" can be deduced from, he says, "premises of the form "x is an animal", "x
has segmented body", "x has jointed legs", and that conversely each of these
sentences is deducible from the former sentence. It appears then that in the latter
case, where we deduce the meaning of the word "arthropod" by seeing what sentences
can be deduced from the sentence "the thing x is an arthropod", we are, in effect,
getting a lexical meaning for arthropod, albeit we are formulating our results in
complete sentences of subject-predicate form. Let's compare the definition Carnap
gives with the definition from an abridged version of the unabridged dictionary I used
previously :

arthropod :
any of a phylum (Arthropoda) of invertebrate animals (as insects, arachnids, and
crustaceans) that have a segmented body and jointed appendages, a usually chitinous
exoskeleton molted at intervals, and a dorsal anterior brain connected to a ventral
chain of ganglia.

The words (terms) "animal", "segmented body" and "jointed legs (appendages)"
appear in both Carnap's and the dictionary definitions. However, the question arises,
has Carnap left out of his definition some necessary terms or their equivalent, viz.
"exoskeleton" and a characterization of the animal's nervous system? To answer this
question, I presume one would have to consult biological taxonomies. This, I feel
confident, would lead to problems involved different taxonomies given by different
biologists (or one biologist at different times), and deciding which ones (if any) are
most authoritative. I won't follow this path, but instead give, for comparison, the
definition of "arthropod" given in the unabridged version of this dictionary :

arthropod :
a phylum consisting of articulate invertebrate animals with jointed limbs, the body
divided into metameric segments, the brain dorsal to the alimentary canal and
connected with a ventral chain of ganglia, and the body generally covered with a
chitinous shell that is molted at intervals and including the crustaceans, insects, and
spiders and related forms as well as several less prominent groups (as the millepedes
and onychophores), often the trilobites, and sometimes the tongue worms, sea spiders,
and water bears

Note the use of the word "often" and "sometimes" in this definition.

2.20. I note that Carnap speaks of "premises of the form" so-and-so being deduced
from "x is an arthropod", which suggests that he was being careful not to claim that
he was going to give a complete definition, but just a sample of the sort of statements
one can deduce. This brings me to the second part of the first criterion Carnap gives
for determining the meaning of a word, viz. deducing "x is an arthropod" from a set
of statements. Does Carnap intend that we verify we have a complete set of
statements for this purpose? How does one do this? In the case of "arthropod", we
could use the criteria in the definitions given by lexicographers in some dictionary,
and trust that the lexicographers have arrived at these definitions by consulting some
authoritative sources (presumably biologists or works written by them). There is still
a question of whether or not one manages to interprets these definitions correctly, and
whether or not the lexicographers interpreted their sources correctly. This may be a
captious objection, since it is well known that humans sometimes make (corrigible)
mistakes. However, there are other problems, such as the facts that there is more than
one authoritative taxonomy and that taxonomies change in time.

2.21. Moreover, and more to my point, when Carnap chose "the thing x is an
arthropod" as an example, he chose a word, "arthropod" which has been explicitly
defined as a technical term in a specific branch of science some of whose
practitioners are especially known for their exhaustive classifications of living
creatures. What if Carnap had chosen, say, "x is a centrifugal force" or "the thing x is
a physical object" or "x is a physical law"? In fact, what if Carnap had chosen his
own first example, "x is a stone"? It appears that for one of the meanings of "stone",
one (or one's lexicographers) should consult geological glossaries or texts (or
geologists). I may be wrong, but I have the impression that "stone" is not a technical
term for geologists in the way "arthropod" is for biologists. I did find a definition of
"stone" in one geological glossary on the Internet : "a small piece of rock; may or
may not refer to ornamental material". The term "rock" is defined in this glossary as:
"An indefinite mixture of naturally occurring substances, mainly minerals. Its
composition may vary in containment of minerals and organic substances, and are
never exact." Hmmm. . . . . .
2.22. Suppose for a moment or two that we compare the process which Carnap has
been recommending for finding a meaning of a word with using a computer in which
there has been stored a program for an unabridged dictionary of the English
language. Having started the program running, a human (e.g. you or me) may use the
computer's keyboard to enter the string "stone" in the appropriate place shown on the
computer's monitor, and then press the key labeled "Enter" (or the equivalent). The
computer takes over, as it were. The program and its electrical means of execution
will cause a jump within the computer's memory, after which a different string of
letters appears on the computer monitor, which, when interpreted by the human,
constitutes a definition of the word "stone". Here the word "stone" is to be
interpreted (by me and hopefully you) in a way that is different from interpretation of
the string "stone". The string "stone", as far as pressing keys of the the computer
keyboard is concerned, is a sequence of letters, or a sequence of pressures by human
fingers on various keys of the keyboard. This sequence appears as a string on the
computer's monitor, and when the "Enter" key is pressed, this string is transformed
into a sequence of electrical impulses in the computer, and after various electrical
activities within the computer, the computer generates a different string which
appears on the monitor, and may be interpreted by a human. The human may then be
said to have found a definition (or meaning) for the word "stone". This is what I did
when I gave a definition of "stone" earlier. What the human does when looking up a
definition of a word in a dictionary in the form of a printed book is an analogous
process. The steps of the process are implemented in a different way involving
various motions and other physiological and/or psychological processes in the human,
rather than the sort of processes which occur within a computer. Another analogous
process occurs when one human asks another human such a question as "What is a
definition of the word "stone" (or maybe "What is the definition of the word "stone",
as if there were one and only one such definition), and the second person responds
(orally) with a definition. My point is not to compare a computer program and its
execution with any psychophysical processes going on within humans, as if to show
that people have something analogous to computer programs located somewhere in
their nervous systems. My point is rather this : In all three cases, the human starts
with words, and the human ends with words. The human has not escaped from
language.

2.23. Using as an example the sentence "the thing x is an arthropod" in which the
word "arthropod" has been imbedded, Carnap has indicated that one can deduce
certain sentences from this sentence, and that the sentence can be deduced from the
sentences which one has deduced from the sentence. The deduced set of sentences
should, he indicates, be necessary and sufficient for the purpose of giving a (or the?)
meaning of the word "arthropod". That is, there should be enough deduced sentences
to unambiguous identify when a creature is an arthropod, but there shouldn't be any
more sentences than is sufficient to identify the creature as an arthropod. However, as
it stands, it appears from what I said above that Carnap has not yet escaped from
language, from words and sentences and made connection with any living creatures.
He is very aware of this situation, and he says:
By means of these stipulations about deducibility . . . of the elementary sentence
about "arthropod" the meaning of the word "arthropod" is fixed. In this way every
word of the language is reduced to other words and finally to the words which occur
in the so-called "observation sentences" or "protocol sentences". It is through this
reduction that the word acquires its meaning.

Thus it appears that we don't get a meaning for the word "arthropod" simply by
deducing sentences from one another, unless in the process of deduction we arrive at
one or more terminal sentences which somehow allows us to escape from language,
from words and sentences, and to move from language to living creatures, or perhaps
to some more inclusive non-linguistic things.

2.24. In order to effect such an escape to what is sometimes called "the real world"
(meant not to include mere verbiage, as people like to say in this connection), Carnap
has introduced what he calls observation or protocol sentences. Thus, for example, in
order to get a meaning for the word "arthropod", those sentences successively
deduced from the elementary sentence "the thing x is an arthropod" must terminate in
one or more protocol sentences. Let's agree for simplicity that if the result of such
repeated deductions is more than one protocol sentence, these sentences can be
reduced (e.g. by conjunction and/or disjunction) to just one protocol sentence. From
what Carnap has said so far, it appears that one can start with the protocol sentence,
and reverse the deduction process to move back to the elementary sentence "the thing
x is an arthropod", and then to the word "arthropod". That is, one can move logically
from the meaning of the word "arthropod", given by a protocol sentence, to the word
arthropod. I will postpone a discussion of this contention until I have examined some
remarks Carnap makes about protocol sentences in the article under consideration.

2.25. On the other hand, Carnap says that

For our purposes we may ignore entirely the question concerning the content and
form of the primary sentences (protocol sentences) which has not yet been definitely
settled. In the theory of knowledge it is customary to say that the primary sentences
refer to "the given"; but there is no unaminity on the question what it is that is given.
At times the position is taken that sentences about the given speak of the simplest
qualities of sense and feeling (e.g., "warm," "blue," "joy," and so forth); others incline
to the view that basic sentences refer to total experiences and similarities between
them; a still different view has it that even the basic sentences speak of things.

This was published in 1932, but the choices it offers for protocol sentences could
have been extracted from a work about sensation and perception written by a
psychologist in 2005. In any case, Carnap claims that whatever the protocol
sentences turn out to be like (assuming, presumably, that their content and form can
be established at all),

it is certain that a sequence of words has a meaning only if its relations of deducibility
to the protocol sentences are fixed . . . and similarly, that a word is significant only if
the sentences in which it may occur are reducible to protocol sentences. Since the
meaning of of a word is determined by its criterion of application (in other words: by
the relations of deducibility entered into by its elementary sentence-form, by its truth
conditions, by the method of its verification), the stipulation of the criterion takes
away one's freedom to decide what one wishes to "mean" by the word. If the word is
to receive an exact meaning, nothing less than the criterion of application must be
given; but one cannot, on the other hand, give more than the criterion of application,
for the latter is a sufficient determination of meaning. The meaning is implicitly
contained in the criterion; all that remains to be done is to make the meaning explicit.

I will try to make some deductions from these proposals of Carnap below, in an effort
to to see what they mean using Carnap's conception of mean (as I take him to mean
mean). I will use Carnap's example, or rather Pap's translations of them to get to
some protocol sentences from some elementary sentences Carnap gives, though I will
not try to get back from the protocol sentences to the original sentences, on the
grounds that such maneuvering is not relevant to Carnap's attack on metaphysics.

3. How to Reason One's Way to Meanings

3.1. It appears, then, that according to Carnap, to find the (exact) meaning of a word,
we must proceed according to rules of logic. I take it that just looking up the word in
a dictionary, or many dictionaries (including ones which translate words (and phrases)
from one language to another), does not qualify as a logical way to find the meaning
of a word, since a person does not (presumably) use rules of inference to get from a
word to other words or sentences in the dictionaries, but rather some other sort of
process. So in order to facilitate use of rules of logic, Carnap recommends that the
first step in finding a meaning for a word should be to embed it in what he calls an
elementary sentence. An example that Carnap gives for this process is "x is a stone",
where "stone" is a word whose meaning is to be found. What is a word here?
Presumably it is just a string of letters in some alphabet (or a sound of a certain kind),
since we have not yet assigned a meaning to what you see (or hear). Strictly
speaking, this example is a sentence (or propositional) function rather than a
sentence, according to common usages. According to Carnap's procedure, we are to
deduce from "x is a stone" other sentence functions. Carnap gives no examples of
such deduced functions for this example (as he does for his other example, "x is an
arthropod"). I will deduce these: "x is a concretion of mineral matter", which is part
of a definition of "stone" given in a dictionary I have. Thus I have looked something
up in a dictionary after all. But then how did Carnap get from "x is an arthropod" to
such functions as "x is an animal", "x has a segmented body", and "x has jointed
legs"? He may have obtained them from his memory, but at some stage in his life,
somehow the words "animal", "segmented body", and "jointed legs" must have
become associated for him with the word "arthropod". However, I wonder if in fact
he peeked in a dictionary (of German words) or a suitable biology book, or asked a
biologist he knew, for suitable terms to associate with "arthropod" in order to form (or
as he says, deduce) sentencel functions which would in fact lead to a meaning of
"arthropod" within a protocolic function.
3.2. In any case, proceeding from my function "x is a concretion of mineral matter", I
seem now to have to look for (somehow) meanings of "mineral" and of "concretion",
so I form I form "x is a mineral" and "x is a concretion". Using the same dictionary, I
deduce from "x is a mineral" the function "x is a solid homogeneous crystalline
chemical element or compound that results from the inorganic processes of nature",
and from "x is a concretion" the function "x is something concreted". In the latter
case, from "x is concreted", I deduce "x is something formed into a solid mass". For
the sake of argument, I will take this last function to be protocolic. (I have formed an
adjective from "protocol" to avoid having to use protocol sentence function to replace
Carnap's protocol sentence, in view of the common use of the term sentence as a
value of a sentence function.) But what about the function I deduced from "x is a
mineral", i.e. "x is a solid homogeneous crystalline chemical element or compound
that results from the inorganic processes of nature"? Is it protocolic? It looks like I
have to consult a mineralogist or works of mineralogists to find out whether one can
empirically verify, or find the truth condition, for a value of this function, say for
example, the value "this stalactite is a stone". I did this, and I find (rather to my
surprise) that stalactites are regarded by some such experts as crystalline. So far, so
good. Is this stalactite solid? Well, I don't have a stalactite at hand, so "this stalactite"
in our function will have to be regarded as a (specific) stalactite that I have in mind.
Let's suppose that this stalactite I have in mind is solid, where solid is suitably
interpreted to apply to what I have in mind. Well, is this stalactite homogeneous?
Well, maybe the one I have in mind is, but I gather from what I read that, in fact,
stalactites are non-homogeneous. So if I move from my imaginary stalactite to a
physically present stalactite, I will probably find upon empirical investigation that it
is not homogeneous. If all of this is correct, and if I take ""x is a solid homogeneous
crystalline chemical element or compound that results from the inorganic processes of
nature" to be protocolic, then I will be able to conclude that the stalactite I test is not a
stone, since it is not a mineral. So under these conditions, I will have found that a
stalactite is not a stone, i.e., the sentence "this stalactite is a stone" is false. On the
other hand, suppose that in "x is a solid homogeneous crystalline chemical element or
compound that results from the inorganic processes of nature", I put x = this diamond
(that I have in mind, and which I have named "this diamond"), and that I find (or I
take someone's word) that the resulting protocol sentence is or can be found to be true
(or can be verified). Then I conclude that "this diamond is a stone" is true. And, if I
understand Carnap correctly, I have found an (exact) meaning for the word "stone": A
stone is a solid homogeneous crystalline chemical element or compound that results
from the inorganic processes of nature. But in common usage, are all stones
crystalline? I will leave this where it is for now.

3.3. I note that for sentence functions, it is customary to specify a domain from
which choices of words or phrases can be made to substitute for x in the examples, to
get sentences, which are values or in the ranges (or images) of this sentence function.
"This diamond is a stone" is a value of the function "x is a stone". Now, what is the
domain from which I chose the word "diamond"? Or did I not choose the word
"diamond" from some domain of words, but rather a physical (or phenomenological)
object from a domain of such objects, a shiny object which I name "this diamond".
How would I know that what chose is in fact a diamond? Unless I just take
someone's word for it, it looks like I will have to find a meaning for "diamond",
which according to Carnap will involve me in making deductions from "x is a
diamond" until I arrive at a protocol sentence which will allow me to conclude, after
some sort of physical or phenomenological testing, that "this diamond is a
diamond".

3.4. We might expect some light to be shed on the sort of questions I'm asking here
by two further examples Carnap gives. For the first, he asks us to suppose a person
invents a new word "teavy" ("babig" in the German) and someone else asks this
person what this word means. Carnap doesn't provide here any deductive chains
linking sentence functions, but instead simply indicates that if the the person provides
no empirical "criterion of application", but still insists the word has a meaning, and
that some things are "teavy" and some are not, then all we can conclude is that the
person associates "some kind of images and feelings with the word." This is said by
Carnap to be a psychological fact, presumably in order to distinguish this fact from
other sorts of facts. These other sorts of facts are presumably empirically verifiable in
some sense of empirical, and moreover, judging from the way Carnap describes this
example, the empirical tests can be understood and applied by anyone who is
competent enough and wishes to do so. This, I take it, is a form of what is commonly
called radical empiricism by philosophers. We do not seem to get from this example
any further explanation of methods of deducing a meaning for a word by reasoning
from elementary sentence functions to protocol sentence functions, or conversely, or
how one might reverse this process. All we know is that a person who introduces a
new word, but provides no way to get protocol statements acceptable to another
person, has not provided a meaning for the word. Carnap concludes :

If no criterion of application for the word is stipulated, then nothing is asserted by the
sentences in which it occurs, they are but pseudo-statements.

3.5. Carnap's other example involving a new word is "toovy" ("bebig" in the
German), a word which is given a meaning. Here someone is assumed to have
invented the word "toovy", and that we (other people) somehow how find out that the
person uses the word just like we use the word "quadrangular", for which we are
assumed to have a meaning, and that the word is used by the inventor in no other
observable way. That is, as far as we are concerned we take "toovy" to be a synonym
for "quadrangular", and, it appears, an exact synonym, with the same denotations and
connotations , or senses and references as the invented word. Then we are to suppose
that the inventor claims that he or she did not intend for the word to mean the same as
"quadrangular", but that the situation is that quadrangularity is only the visible
manifestation of toovyness, and toovyness happens not to be observable. Carnap says
:

We would reply that after the criterion of application has been fixed, the synonymy of
"toovy" and "quadrangular" is likewise fixed, and that we are no further at liberty to
"intend" this or that by the word.
I note that the "criterion of application" presumably has been fixed by us, and that we
(excluding the inventor) are stuck with a meaning of "toovy" which makes it
completely interchangeable with "quadrangular", and, I take it, therefore superfluous,
except possibly to indicate to us that the inventor has some private meaning for the
word which we cannot access, no matter how hard we may try. Again, in the
treatment of this example, nothing further has been added about methods of deducing
meanings.

3.6. It is striking that in the examples which Carnap used when he sketched his
method for deducing meanings by inferring protocol sentences from elementary
sentences, he used nouns "stone" and "arthropod", nouns (or names) of a special kind
which are commonly agreed by speakers of English (starting in early childhood) to
refer to something, i.e. to some thing, where "thing" means some observable object, or
perhaps some consistently invoked phenomenon. I wonders how one is to obtain a
meaning for the word "freedom" deductively, starting with the elementary sentence
function as "x is a freedom", or (even more puzzling) "x is freedom" (without the
indefinite article "a"). I leave aside for the time being questions arising from the fact
that some languages do not use a copulative or linking "is" in a sentence
corresponding to one in English of the form "x is a [noun]" (at least for many nouns),
so that for example the Russian corresponding to English "this stalactite is a stone"
can be stated in Russian so that its word-by-word translation into English would be
"this stalactite stone". As a matter of fact, people learning English as adults often
make statements like "this stalactite stone", and are understood by native speakers of
English to mean "this stalactite is a stone". If such a learner of English just said
"stalactite stone", a native speaker of English would most likely take this to mean
"this stalactite is a stone" provided the learner was actively pointing to stalactite or a
representation of one, but perhaps in the absence of an observable stalactite (or
picture of one, or even a mention of the word "stalactite") would take it to mean
"stalactite is stone", meaning "all stalactites are stones". Such considerations as these
point to some difficulties which can arise in connection with forming and interpreting
sentence functions, and forming and interpreting their values, i.e. sentences obtained
from the functions by substitution for a variable.

3.7. Moreover, in his examples involving invented words, Carnap doesn't use noun-
like words, but ones which are customarily classified grammatically as adjectives.
What does one do with an elementary sentence of the form "x is free" to deduce a
meaning for "free"? One might take it that "x is free" is equivalent to "x has
freedom", or "x participates in freedom", or "x is able to exercise a freedom". But
then it looks like one would be faced with some sort of set theoretical concept, along
the lines of "x is in F" where F = set of all freedoms, and with problems involving
universals, of the sort suggested by comparing "x is a freedom" (which can be
regarded a set-theoretic) with "x is freedom". The formulation "x is freedom" seems
to beg for a reification of "freedom", as existing in some idealized or abstracted way,
or at any rate for a concept of naming some more or less well-defined collectivity
along with ways to use the name. And then there are the other traditional part of
speech, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections; and
there are other signs or symbols or ways of writing which seem to have some sort of
meaning. In written speech, there are punctuation marks, italics, boldface, change of
fonts or sizes of characters, mathematical and special scientific notations, notations
for formal logics, smiley face symbols and so-called emoticons, etc., etc. In spoken
language, there are changes of pitch and loudness, facial and other body expressions
or movements, use of simulated or genuine foreign or regional accents and so on.
How do we assign meanings which take into account all this? Perhaps, for purposes
of doing science, Carnap had in mind requiring that in dealing with such a statement
function as "x is a [word]", one should only substitute for [word] words of a certain
type or class, which one would presumably have to specify more or less
comprehensively (and comprehensibly). Similarly, one might specify what words,
corresponding to what kind of things, can be put for x. Perhaps one would have to
vary what can be substituted for x (the domain of x) depending what word has been
substituted for [word] in a statement function, for the purposes of doing science
(whatever "doing science" means). For example, in "x is a stone", one might confine
oneself to substituting for x what one takes as physical objects (however these are to
be identified), or to sense data of certain kinds, or Husserlian phenomena
characterized in some way. On the other hand, for "x is an electron" or "x is a law of
nature", one might want to restrict oneself to different sorts of substitutions for x (or
at least, in the case of "electron", extend some former specification for a "physical
object").

4. Metaphysical Words Without Meanings

4.1. Carnap proceeds again with examples. He asks us first to consider the term
(Terminus, not Wort) "principle" (Prinzip). He says we are to understand this term in
the sense of "principle of being, not principle of knowledge or axiom". Thus it
appears that he is asking us to consider the term (or word, in the extended sense I
discussed earlier) "principle of being", rather than just the term (or word) "principle".
However this may be, he observes that "various metaphysicians offer an answer to the
question [of] which is the (highest) "principle of the world" (or of "things," of
"existence", of "being"), e.g. water, number, form, motion, life, the spirit, the idea, the
unconscious, activity, the good, and so forth. (Trivia question: which philosophers
was Carnap thinking about here?) He then says that in order to find out what these
metaphysicians mean by such terms, we should (actually, he says that we must) ask
the metaphysician "under what conditions a statement of the form "x is the principle
of y" would be true and under what conditions it would be false. (So here we have a
sentence function of two variables; however, Carnap has been using such functions
tacitly earlier, e.g. when he used as examples the two sentences "x is a stone" and "x
is an arthropod".) Carnap claims that when a metaphysician is asked "for the criteria
of application or for the definition of the word 'principle' as the metaphysician uses
the word in such phrases as 'principle of being', that the metaphysician replies
approximately as follows: 'x is the principle of y' is to mean 'y arises out of x,' 'the
being of y rests on the being of x,' 'y exists by virtue of x' and so forth." (In German, ,
these alleged replies read "y geht aus x hervor", "das Sein von y beruht auf dem Sein
von x", "y besteht durch x"). Carnap proclaims that "these words are ambiguous and
vague", and that the metaphysician doesn't use these words as they are sometimes
used to indicate "empirically observable" relations. "The expression 'arising from' ",
Carnap says, "is not to mean here a relation of temporal and causal sequence, which is
what the word ordinarily means."

4.2 Thus Carnap appears to be lodging a double complaint against metaphysicians.

First, metaphysicians use sentences which don't provide an empirical way to
understand or verify what they mean, which, in view of what he has said earlier,
presumably means that one can't deduce protocol sentences from sentences which are
instances of such sentence functions as "y arises out of x" (as metaphysicians use
"arises out of", at least sometimes). Second, metaphysicians don't always use
ordinary meanings of words, which leads to words being deprived of their ordinary
meanings, although, he says, "From an earlier period of significant use, it [the word]
is still associatively connected with various mental images; these get associated with
new mental images and feelings in the new context of meaning." However, Carnap
makes it clear that such new mental images and feelings do not furnish a new
meaning for a word, since there is no way to connect the word with something that
can be sensed and perceived by Carnap and anyone else who can carry out what is
indicated by protocol sentences derived from such an offending sentence asserted by
a metaphysician. This seems not to take into account any procedure which might be
proposed by a metaphysician (or theologian, or mystic) by means of which a person
can successfully (at least sometimes) produce mental images and feelings which
sufficiently resemble what the metaphysician intends to convey, and can be regarded
as communicating a meaning from the metaphysician to the other person. This is
presumably because, in Carnap's view, a meaning of a word must not only be to some
degree communicable, more or less faithfully, but the word must also point to a way
to associate the word with something (or, some thing) which is external to both the
metaphysician and other people. Otherwise, I suppose, one can, in the spirit of what
Carnap has said, conclude that the word, in colloquial English, is "all in one's mind",
i.e. only imaginary or not real, where "imaginary" and "real" are used here in some
ordinary senses. Or, to use Carnap's way of speaking, one can say the word has no
meaning (Bedeutung, akin to deuten auf, "point to" -- which suggests that a
meaningless word, according to Carnap, doesn't point to anything, or at least to
anything worthwhile).

4.3. Carnap next discusses usages of the word "God". Carnap speaks, in the manner
of Auguste Comte and his positive philosophy, of an historical evolution of usages
from the mythological to the metaphysical to the theological, although he notes that
these stages of usage overlap temporally. He regards mythological uses of the word
"god" (or the equivalent in languages other than English) as having a "clear
meaning", since he takes such usages to denote physical beings, beings which can
manifest themselves either as human-like or by means of things or processes which
are empirically verifiable. He asserts that metaphysical usages of the word "God"
refer to "something beyond experience". In such usages, he says, not even the first
requirement of finding a meaning for the word "God" is met, namely forming an
elementary sentence [function] of the form "x is a God" (Pap translates "x ist ein
Gott" by "x is a God", although in English usage, such mythological beings would
require "x is a god" to prevent problems arising about monotheism versus polytheism,
or about what constitutes a religion as opposed to a mythology.) Carnap says of the
function "x is a God" (or "x is God", perhaps) that a metaphysician "rejects this form
entirely without substituting another, or if he accepts it he neglects to indicate the
syntactical category of the variable x". To explain what he means by "syntactical
category", he says: "Categories are, for example, material things, relations between
things, numbers, etc." Using a different terminology, it appears that Carnap is saying
that metaphysicians do not specify an admissible domain for the sentence function "x
is a god", a domain of sort which Carnap has in mind, consisting of such things as
things (physical objects), or relations between things, or such (mysterious) entities as
numbers.

4.4 Thus Carnap is saying, using his special formulation based on logic, that
metaphysicians use the word "god" (or "God") and then ignore or resist or don't see
the necessity of using the word in sentences from which one can deduce protocol
sentences which connect "God" to the sort of things -- well, to the sort of things
Carnap wants the metaphysicians to connect them to. These presumably could be
things which can be perceived in the manner humans interact with physical objects,
without prejudice as to whether or not humans are seeing the objects in themselves, or
seeing some sort of phenomenal representations of the objects, or both. In short,
metaphysicians refuse to be scientists. As far as theologians are concerned, Carnap
says that "several theologians have a clearly empirical (in our terminology,
"mythological") concept of God", and that "in this case there are no pseudo-
statements", i.e. no statements using "God" without having in mind a meaning for the
word. However, according to Carnap, this makes their statements "subject to the
judgment of empirical science". Carnap doesn't say so explicitly, but I suspect that
when he said this, he had in mind that that their statements would then turn out to be
unverifiable, or perhaps just false. Other theologians, says Carnap, make statements
using the term "God" which are "clearly metaphysical", i.e. which are meaningless,
which assert nothing, which are mere pseudo-statements. He also points to some
theologians who alternate between the metaphysical and the empirical, and to some
whose statements can't be classified as one or the other, but seem to be both at once,
which Carnap seems to take as illegitimate. (Note: With Heidegger in mind, I note
that when Carnap says pseudo-statements "assert nothing" (besagen nichts), he must
mean that they "do not assert something", and not that they "assert nothing", i.e.
affirm the existence of that which doesn't exist. Presumably this would require
"besagen Nichts", as in Heidegger's notorious question in Was ist Metaphysik?, which
is among those Carnap is about to complain about : Wie steht es um das Nichts?,
translated by Krell as "How is it with the nothing?")

4.5. Next, we are to consider these two sentences (as contrasted with words) :

(1) Caesar is and

(2) Caesar is a prime number

These are offered as statements which are meaningless, and therefore pseudo-
statements, not because they contain meaningless words, but because, although the
words in the statement are meaningful, "the words are put together in such a way that
nevertheless no meaning results". The first of these, "Caesar is and" is said to
violates a rule of grammar, since "the rules of syntax require that the third position be
occupied, not by a conjunction, but by a predicate, hence by a noun (with article) or
by an adjective." I take it that Carnap was referring specifically to grammar of the
German language, but his rule can also be applied to grammar of the English
language, if not to all languages. Carnap doesn't offer an explanation of how one
arrives at the assumed meanings of the terms "Caesar", "is", and "and". Let's take it
that the word "Caesar" functions as a noun, bypassing any difficulties as may arise in
connecting the string of letters or the sound of "Caesar" with the string or sounds "the
author of Bellum gallicum", and the bountiful difficulties in pinning down relations
between sense and reference, name and description, denotation and connotation, etc.,
etc.. And let's ignore the fact that Carnap's recommended procedure for assigning
meanings to words has so far been applied only to nouns and adjectives, although he
assumes here that the conjunction "and" and the contentious verb "is" have been or at
least can be assigned meanings. In any case, most speakers of English would, I think,
agree that "Caesar is and" is a meaningless statement, for whatever reasons.

4.6. So let's consider "Caesar is a prime number". This statement is syntactically

permissible, since, Carnap says, it is formed in the same way as "Caesar is a general",
which we are expected to agree is a meaningful statement. Carnap asserts, however,
the "Caesar is a prime number" is meaningless since " 'prime number' is a predicate of
numbers; it can be neither affirmed nor denied of a person." That is, a predicate, or
rather a predicate function, must have a specified domain. In this instead, we can set
Pr = "prime number", and consider the function Pr(x). We may specify that the x may
be replaced only by a certain entity which we call a number, or rather by a name of a
number, a numeral. Suppose that we agree on some grounds or the other that
"Caesar" is the name of a person, and that the name of a person cannot be the name of
a number, or that we simply agree that Caesar is a person, and a person is not a
number. Then when we substitute "Caesar" for x in Pr(x), we will be violating a rule
which we have set forth that the domain of Pr(x) can only consist of names of
numbers, then we are entitled (it seems) to declare that Pr(Caesar) is meaningless. By
analogy with the process that Carnap has used to assign a meaning to a word, we
might expect that the reason "Caesar is a prime number" is meaningless is that no
(syntactically properly formed) statement which is empirically verifiable or falsifiable
can be deduced from it, according to rules of logic. However, it appears that the
reason is rather that we have illegitimately evaluated the predicate function "x is a
prime number" at an entity which is not in the domain of this function. Thus
according to Carnap, we can conclude that a word is meaningless if we can show that
there is no way to deduce a protocol sentence from an elementary sentence containing
that word, and we can conclude that a statement which is composed only of
meaningful words is meaningless, it is a pseudo-statement, if we can show that we
have evaluated a statement function at something not in the domain of that function
which Carnap (or someone else) has specified. Carnap in this article evidently has
this in mind when he rejects "Caesar is a prime number" simply by saying " 'x is a
prime number' is false if and only if x is divisible by a number different from a and
from 1; evidently it is illicit to put here 'Caesar' for 'x' ". (Note: I observe that in
English the term "prime number" is formed of two orthographic words, while in
German the term is a single orthographical word, 'Primzahl'. This suggests a possible
problem about whether or not in specifying a domain for a statement function one has
to be careful about separate meanings of distinct orthographic words in a phrase
made up of more than one orthographic, but taken as a single lexical word.)

4.7. Carnap concludes this section of his article with a description of how logicians
seek to construct a logical syntax for language which would allow us to talk or write
without making pseudo-statements, presumably to be used along with a logical
technique for avoiding the use of meaningless words :

The fact that natural languages allow the formation of meaningless sequences of
words without violating the rules of grammar, indicates that grammatical syntax is,
from a logical point of view, inadequate. If grammatical syntax differentiated not
only the word-categories of nouns, adjectives, verbs, conjunctions etc., but within
each of these categories made the further distinctions that are logically indispensable,
then no pseudo-statements could be formed. If, e.g., nouns were grammatically
subdivided into several kinds of words, according as they designated properties of
physical objects, of numbers etc., then the words "general" and "prime number"
would belong to grammatically different word-categories . . . . . In a correctly
constructed language, therefore, all nonsensical sequences of words would be just as
linguistically correct as (1) [i.e., "Caesar is and"]. Considerations of grammar would
already eliminate them as it were automatically; i.e. in order to avoid nonsense, it
would be unnecessary to pay attention to the meanings of the individual words over
and above their syntactical type (their "syntactical category," e.g. thing, property of
things, relation between things, number, property of numbers, relation between
numbers, and so forth). It follows that if our thesis that the statements of metaphysics
are pseudo-statements is justifiable, then metaphysics could not even be expressed in
a logically constructed language. This is the great philosophical importance of the
task, which at present occupies the logicians of building a logical syntax.

This is a succinct statement of Carnap's recipe for adhering to David Hume's

exhortation in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding :

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let
us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No.
Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?
No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

And it also a statement of a proposed way to construct a language in which such

sophistry and illusion would automatically be eliminated from discourse constructed
in such a language rather than in a natural language (Carnap discusses this
distinction later in the article). As such, Carnap's program is often classified as neo-
Kantian, in that if it were successful, it would provide a tool for dealing with
problems and theories of the natural sciences (and perhaps science in general,
whatever that is) while avoiding the kind of metaphysics Kant found objectionable.
5. Carnap Confronts Heidegger

5.1. At last we get to Carnap's example of metaphysical pseudo-statements, chosen

from Heidegger's Was ist Metaphysik. For convenience, I will repeat here the
passages to be criticized as given in the translation by Arthur Pap :

What is to be investigated is being only and -- nothing else; being alone and nothing
further -- nothing; solely being, and beyond being -- nothing. What about this
Nothing? . . . Does the Nothing exist only because the Not, i.e. the Negation, exists?
Or is it the other way around? Does Negation and the Not exist only because the
Nothing exists? . . . We assert : the Nothing is prior to the Not and the Negation. . . .
Where do we seek the Nothing? How do we find the Nothing? . . . We know the
Nothing . . . Anxiety reveals the Nothing. . . . That for which and because of which
we were anxious, was 'really' -- nothing. Indeed : the Nothing itself -- as such -- was
present. . . . What about this Nothing? . . . The Nothing itself nothings.

5.2. Carnap doesn't deal with these passages directly, but rather by comparing the
sort of statements made here by Heidegger with some sample sentences. First, he
considers what he takes to be two meaningful sentences of ordinary language, the
question "What is outside?", and an answer to the question, "Rain is outside". He
then offers a "Transition from Sense to Nonsense in Ordinary Language" by
substituting the word "Nothing" for the word "Rain" in "Rain is outside", to get the
sentence "Nothing is outside". This last sentence is then replaced with what Carnap
calls a "logically correct" sentence, "There is nothing (does not exist anything) which
is outside". I note that if the elaboration in parentheses in this last sentence is at all
optional, then the logically correct sentence is just "There is nothing which is
outside." This last formulation seems to raise the same problem as the allegedly
nonsensical sentence "Nothing is outside". What is this problem? It appears to be
that the sentence "Nothing is outside" may lead one to conclude that there is in fact
something outside, which may lead one to conclude that the word "Nothing" is some
sort of object, be it physical or phenomenal. The fact is, though, in ordinary English,
most people will not understand the sentence this way, at least when they aren't
discussing philosophical matters. They will also take the sentence "There is nothing
which is outside" not to assert the existence of a "nothing", i.e. interpret the "is" as
asserting some sort of physical or phenomenal existence of an object. Most people,
under most circumstances (not including those involving certain philosophical
usages) will take the sentence "Nothing is outside", especially as an answer to "What
is outside?, to signify a version of Carnap's logically correct sentence, viz. "There
does not exist anything which is outside", or something semantically equivalent to
this. (I forego an elaboration of what I mean by semantical equivalence, other than to
say that what I mean when I say that two sentences are semantically equivalent is that
the two sentences have the same meaning, or at least near enough to the same
meaning in the context(s) in which they are used. Besides leading me into the
labyrinth of theories of meaning, this would lead me into discussing the virtues, or
maybe even the necessity, of circular definitions and circular reasoning, under some
conditions.) So far, one might interpret Carnap's discussion as an analysis of a certain
kind of joke, or pun. Thus in an attempt at humor, someone (especially a child) might
point out that because "Rain is outside" and "Nothing is outside" sound or look to be
the same sort of assertions, then "Nothing" is the same sort of object as "Rain", or
that "Nothing" is a name for the same sort of object that "Rain" is the name is.

5.3. Carnap goes further, however, by translating the sentences into a symbolic
language. He does this to start with by setting "What is outside?" = Ou(?), and "Rain
is outside" = Ou(r). Thus the word "outside" has become a predicate, and from this a
sentence function is constructed, symbolized here by Ou(?) rather than, say, Ou(x).
(The use of "?" rather than "x" to denote the place where candidates from a specified
domain can be substituted to form sentences which can be used to deduce verifiable
or falsifiable sentences is meant to suggest that we are expected to put something in
place of the symbol "?", i.e., we are expected to answer a question. I am aware that I
might fruitfully expostulate here about what a predicate is, but I will assume that
some more or less satisfactory meaning has been attached to or predicated of the
term "predicate".) Having constructed Ou(?), then Carnap evaluates this function at r
= "Rain", to get "Rain is outside". I note that "Rain is outside" is Pap's translation of
the German "Draussen ist Regen", which if translated from left to right, is "Outside is
rain", an English sentence which would lead a native speaker of English to conclude
that the sentence was formed by a person who was not a native speaker of Engllish.
But, as a matter of fact, Pap's version, "Rain is outside" would likely lead to the same
conclusion. The answer most often given by a native speaker of English to the
question "What is outside?" would be "It's raining outside". In fact, a native speaker
of English might have trouble understanding that the question "What is outside?" was
meant to elicit an answer concerning rain, i.e. the speaker might not realize in many
contexts that "rain" was meant by the questioner to be in the domain of Ou(?). To
indicate that the questioner meant "rain" to be in the domain of Ou(?), the question
might have been put in the form "What's that sound outside?", or perhaps "What's
that, outside?" where the comma indicates a kind of pause and emphasis which would
be interpreted as asking what that sound is, provided both the person questioned and
the questioner were hearing a sound. Such are the vagaries of ordinary language, as
language is used ordinarily.

5.4. In any case, after forming Ou(?) and Ou(r), Carnap turns to a different evaluation
of Ou(?). He evaluates at "nothing" = no, geting Ou(no) which symbolizes, according
to Pap's translation, "Nothing is outside". Confusion is somewhat confounded here,
since in the original German, this symbol for this sentence is dr(Ni), and the German
for the sentence symbolized is "Draussen ist nichts". Thus we get tangled up with the
fact that "Draussen" is capitalized not because it is a German noun, but because it is
the first word in the German sentence; in fact, as used here, "draussen" appears to be
classifiable as either an adverb or an adjective. There is a further capitalization
problem insofar as in the English translation, "Nothing" is capitalized because it is the
first word in a sentence, which may suggest, once more, that Nothing is something.
Furthermore, in the German sentence, "nichts" is not capitalized, which suggests that
whatever part of speech is meant (probably not a noun, but a pronoun), it is not the
noun das Nichts = "nothingness", or the noun das Nicht = "the Not" = negation. To
further muddy the waters, I note that in the German symbol for the sentence
"Draussen ist nichts", Carnap (or a typesetter) has put "Ni" with a capital "N" for
uncapitalized "nichts".

5.5. Now we come to the cruncher in this example. Carnap offers as a logically
correct form of the German sentence "Draussen ist nichts" the sentence "Es gibt nicht
(existiere nicht, ist nicht vorhanden) etwas, das draussen ist." He also offers as a
symbol for this sentence ~(Ex)(dr(x)). In my experience as a mathematician, I have
found that this symbol is commonly translated, at least into spoken English, by
something close to (or the same as) "There does not exist an x such that d r of x".
However, one also hears such versions as "There isn't any x such that d r x" or the
like, relying on the "is" to be interpreted in the sense of "exist". I will take it that
correspondingly the phrase es gibt nicht etwas in German can be translated either as
"there doesn't exist" or "there isn't anything",depending on such matters as emphasis,
stylistic preferences, habit, or just plain chance. Thus in English, I will take it that
suitable translations of "Es gibt nicht etwas, das draussen ist" are "There isn't
anything which is outside" and "There doesn't exist something which is outside". A
close equivalent in English to these is the statement "There is nothing outside".
However, "There exists nothing, which is outside" (with a comma, as in the German)
or "Nothing exists outside" as translations of "Es existiere nicht etwas, das draussen
ist" might well lead one to point out, perhaps mischievously, that these English
sentences can be interpreted, as asserting the existence of that which does not exist.
In any case, Pap translates Carnap's sentence by "There is nothing (does not exist
anything) which is outside". Thus Pap avoids translating the phrase ist nicht
vorhanden used by Carnap. This is perhaps just as well, since Heidegger uses the
word "vorhanden" in a special sense, and contrasts it with the unusual word
"zuhanden". In such contexts, "vorhanden" is often translated by "present-at-hand"
and "zuhanden" by "ready-to-hand". Speaking vaguely, what Heidegger wants to do,
it seems, is to make a distinction between theoretical and practical objects, or between
theory and practice, or between "thinking about" (e.g., about "phenomena") and
"working with" (e.g., using tools). Presumably Carnap had no such distinctions in
mind, but just wanted "Es ist nicht vorhanden etwas, das draussen ist" to convey
approximately the sense in English of "There is not something present outside" or (as
used before) "There is nothing outside".

5.6. In the formula ~(Ex)(dr(x)), the symbol Ex is called an existential quantifier.

From what I have said earlier, one may consider that this notation is deficient insofar
as it doesn't include any indication that Carnap seems always to have a domain in
mind from which an existent or subsistent or entity or object can be chosen, a domain
which is limited in some way, and doesn't consist of just anything. What sort of
existents might one want to include in a domain for dr = draussen, or to revert to
English, Ou = outside? Clearly, Carnap intends rain to be included. What else?
Flowers, visitors, cars, stars, chocolate bars -- things of this sort seem all right. What
about Ou(Plato) = "Plato is outside"? Well, it depends. If Plato is taken as the name
of the family dog, it's OK, but if it's taken as the name of the well-known ancient
Greek philosopher, then while at one time the answer "Plato is outside" to "What is
outside?" might have been reasonable (true or false), but a couple of thousand years
later and more, it would have to be taken as a joke, or as involving some sort of
metaphorical use of the term "Plato", e.g. an interpretation of something Plato wrote
which is about to be entered into a discussion by the person who made this answer. I
rather doubt that Carnap considered this sort of allowable substitution for x in Ou(x).
Even more, how about putting "The Platonic Idea of Truth is outside" for x in Ou(x).
If so, from ~(Ex)(Ou(x)) could be translated into ordinary English as "There is no
Platonic Idea of Truth which is outside". The truth or falsity of this would, it seems,
depend on an interpretation of the term "outside". It does seem to me, though, that it
would be stretching this term, or would be a feeble metaphorical use of the term, to
suppose that "outside" would be intended to signify something like "outside the
physical universe", or perhaps "outside the bounds of good sense". In any case, for
all I can tell from what Carnap has said, "There is no Platonic Idea of Truth which is
outside" is a logically correct statement, provided Carnap didn't have in mind a
restricted domain for Ou(x).

5.7. In any case, it appears that this sort of thing is more than Carnap wanted to
address here, and that he was just telling us that "Draussen ist nichts" or "Nothing is
outside" shouldn't mislead us into thinking that "nichts" = "etwas", or "nothing" =
"something" because the grammatical form of these statements is the same as
"Draussen ist Regen" or "Rain is outside" (leaving aside the awkwardness of the
English version). After this example, Carnap turns to the question, "Wie steht es um
diesen Regen?", translated by Pap as "What about this rain?". Carnap elaborates on
this statement or offers as synonymous with it the statements "was tut der Regen?"
and "was lässt sich über diesen Regen sonst noch aussagen?", translated by Pap as
"what does the rain do" and "what else can be said about this rain". (It appears that in
context, "what is the rain doing" would be a more appropriate translation for the first
of these.) Carnap gives two answers to this question (or these questions, regarded as
saying the same thing): "Wir kennen den Regen" and "Der Regen regnet", translated
by Pap as "We know the rain" and "The rain rains". Here again, it seems more
appropriate here, or at least more colloquial, to translate the first of these by "We
know it is raining" or "We recognize that it's raining". As to the "The rain rains", one
might offer as an alternative something like "The rain is falling", since "The rain
rains" sounds quite jocular in English, and/or somewhat dejected. In any case, this is
beside Carnap's point.

5.8. Carnap now comes to the crux of his complaint about Heidegger's allegedly
illogical use of language. He sets out to compare the answers he gave to "What about
this rain?" to some grammatically analogous answers to the question notoriously
posed by Heidegger in his Was ist Metaphysik?: "Wie steht es um dieses Nichts?",
translated by Pap as "What about this Nothing?" (I note here that Carnap answers
"Was ist draussen?" with "Draussen ist nichts" with "nichts" uncapitalized, but
answers "Wie steht es um dieser Nichts?" with "Nichts" capitalized. In the light of
what I've said earlier about "nicht", "nichts", "das Nicht" and "das Nichts", this is
questionable, this is suspicious -- see below.) Carnap offers three answers to
Heidegger's question "What about this Nothing?", derived from what Heidegger
wrote. The first is symbolized by k(Ni), with Ni = Nichts, and three instances of k are
given, translated by Pap with "We seek the Nothing", "We find the Nothing" and "We
know the Nothing". The second answer quoted is "Das Nichts nichtet", and the third
is a truncated quotation, "Es gibt das Nichts nur, weil . . ." These are symbolized by
ni(Ni) and ex(Ni). Now as to logically correct forms for these answers, which
according to what Carnap indicates would be symbolized by ~(Ex)(k(Ni)) and so on,
Carnap says "None of these forms can even be constructed". They are what Carnap
calls pseudo-statements (Scheinsätze).

5.9. Why can't these answers be transformed into logically correct statements? Of
the first answer (with three instances), Carnap says that Heidegger's error is simply
that the word "nichts" in, for example, "Wir suchen das Nichts" = "We seek the
Nothing" has been applied as if it were the name of an object (Gegenstandsname).
(In Carnap's explanation, he uses "nichts" although in the sentence at hand he uses
"Nichts".) Carnap declares that in ordinary language this word ("nichts" and/or
"Nichts") is not used as the name of an object, but to indicate that one should
understand that one is to interpret or translate the sentence into a negative existential
statement of the sort symbolized by ~(Ex)(f(x)), with an appropriate substitution for
"f" (presumably along with a suitable domain). So here Carnap is making a statement
about ordinary language, and about a certain relation of it to a purified or rectified
language which is logically sound (unlike, one gathers, ordinary language in general),
and whose soundness can be best guaranteed by moving back and forth between
appropriate symbols for (interpreted) words and the words themselves. So what
happens if we try this with "We seek the Nothing"? Using Pap's notation, we can
symbolized "We seek the nothing" with K(no) where "no" = "nothing" and (for
example) "K" = "we are seekers of" or the equivalent. ("K" = "we seek" doesn't seem
to work.) We are already stopped here before we try to use an existential quantifier
because, I would say, according to Carnap's view, the word "nothing" cannot be
legitimately be put into the domain of this "K", or into the domain of any other
choice for "K". It seems that this is because domains are here assumed to contain
only nouns or names of objects (phenomenal or physical), and "nothing" is not really
a noun, or should not be taken as the name of an object. Aside from my emphasis on
the use of domains for statement functions, this seems to be equivalent to what
Carnap has said about this example.

5.10. Carnap's second answer to "What about this Nothing?", taken from Heidegger's
Was ist Metaphysik? is "Das Nichts nichtet" which Pap translates as "The Nothing
nothings" (my first impulse is to translate it by "The Nothing negates"). Of this
sentence, Carnap says that the word "nichtet" (or its infinitive, "nichten") is a
meaningless word, and furthermore it is not meaningless because it is a meaningful
word "deprived of its meaning through its metaphorical use in metaphysics", but
because here "a new word is introduced which never had a meaning to begin with." I
suppose we can take Carnap's word for the newness of "nichten". However, there is a
German word "nichte" as in Der Regen machte all seine Chancen zu nichte which can
be translated as "The rain made his chances come to nothing", i.e. "The rain ruined
his chances" (note the use of "nothing" in the first of these translations into English).
There is also a word "vernichten" which, depending on context, can be translated as
"destroy", "ruin", "defeat", "wipe out", "annihilate", "kill", "exterminate", etc. (Also,
"die Nichte" means "the niece", but this seems to be irrelevant here.)
5.11. In any case, Carnap's assertion that "nichten" never had a meaning to begin
with seems, in the present context, to have to be based on the fact that there is no way
to logically deduce a protocol sentence from an elementary sentence containing the
word "nichtet" (or "nichten", or some other inflected form). In the article I am
analyzing, Carnap only gives examples of elementary sentences of the form "x is a
T", corresponding to a sentence function symbolized by T(x), where T is derived from
a name or noun. Suppose we try "x nichtet" as a suitable elementary sentence. To see
what this might involve, let's look first at Carnap's example of an elementary
sentence, "x is a stone". Let's try taking in place of "x is a stone" the sentence "x
stones", where "stones" is a new word I have introduced, an inflection the verb "to
stone", where "to stone" has been given a new meaning (or definition) taken to
signify something like "is being a stone" or perhaps "to engage in an activity of
existing as or becoming a stone", under the assumption that the noun "stone" has
already been given a logically satisfactory meaning by application of Carnap's
procedure. Let's choose the interpretation "x is being a stone" for "x stones", since
this seems to say much the same thing as "x is a stone", except that " x is being a
stone" introduces time in a way that "x is a stone" doesn't (or doesn't have to). What
sort of symbol should we use for "x stones"? If we try s(x), where "s" = "stones", and
we try translating back into English in the way we did with nouns, we get "x is a
stones", and we seem not to be forming a valid sentence according to ordinary
English usages. Let's try s(x) where "s" stands for "to stone", the infinitive form of
the verb "to stone" furnished with my new meaning. Then to get a meaning for "to
stone" as I have defined the term using the process described by Carnap, it seems we
must reason our way to a protocolic sentence function of the form "to stone is to x"
for which the domain is to consist of words designating acts or actions or
occurrences or perhaps temporal processes, which is to say, by verbs. Another
possibility would be to work with participles instead of verbs, e.g. using "x is
stoning" in place of "x stones". Then we would look for protocolic sentence
functions of the form "stoning is x", where x would be replaced by participles. For
the infinitive form "to stone is to x" we might get a protocol sentence like "to stone is
to retain such-and-such kinds of structure for some length of time as shown by such-
and-such empirical tests or such-and-such phenomena", whereas using participles, we
could say the same in the form "stoning is retaining such-and-such kinds of structure
for some length of time as shown by such-and-such empirical tests or such-and-such
phenomena", and these say the same.

5.12. When I examined Carnap's method for deriving a meaning for "stone" from "x
is a stone", I started with a dictionary definition, a lexical meaning for "stone",
although I indicated that one could also start by consulting a geologist or the like.
Here, we can't start quite that way, because as far as I know, the word "stone" never
appears in dictionaries as a verb with the sense I have designated (although it appears
as a verb in a number of other senses). This suggests that in this situation I should try
to create, and to communicate in the form of comprehensible statements, some
empirical way to find out whether or not an activity is engaged in the activity of being
a stone. At this point, one might want to consider whether or not anyone else besides
me will use my criteria for verifying whether or not "stoning" is going on in my
sense, but that would be part of another story, so I leave it aside.
5.13. I will now try applying my procedure described above to n(x), where "n" =
"nothings", by examining the function "to nothing is to x". Despite the fact that
Heidegger seems to have been trying to introduce a meaning for "nothing" ("nichten")
as a verb, and that such a meaning isn't found in standard dictionaries, I will to start
with try looking up synonyms for the word "annihilate", which occurred to me when I
considered trying to assigned a meaning for "nothing" as a verb. That is, I will first
set out to deduce a protocol sentence by using "to nothing is to annihilate". When I
try my previous trick of using lexical meanings to help me, I find "to destroy utterly"
as a synonym for "to annihilate". Actually what I find is: "to destroy utterly (matter
cannot be annihilated)". This suggests to me that what Heidegger was after in
making a verb "to nothing" ("zu nichten") was to somehow introduce a name for an
activity which does annihilate matter, or to put it in somewhat more in the style of
Heidegger, he wanted to talk about annihilation of Being, where Being is a term
meant to cover all that can't help trying to continue to exist. Nevertheless, when one
considers, say, death of humans, or death of an ancient city, or even death of two
physical particles when they interact and become one different particle, one may
suspect that what can't help trying to exist nevertheless can get annihilated.
Moreover, in the case of human deaths, one might want to talk about a human being
utterly destroyed as a human being, or about the soul or mind of a human being
utterly and irrecoverably destroyed. It seems that Heidegger was trying to give a
name to what can't help trying to utterly destroy what exists, and also to what this
whatever-it-is does, by naming that which can't help trying to utterly destroy what
exists "the Nothing" (das Nichts), and name what the Nothing does by inventing a
verb "to nothing" (zu nichten)..

5.14. The nonstandard German verb nichten used by Heidegger looks or sounds like
it is related to the standard verb vernichten. Similarly, I will introduce a nonstandard
English word nihilate suggested by the standard English word annihilate. I then
translate Heidegger's das Nichts nichtet as "the Nothing nihilates" rather than "the
Nothing nothings", as Pap did. Admittedly, this annihilates the assonance of the
German version, but on the other hand we get in English a better looking and
sounding present participle, nihilating, rather than the over-assonant nothinging we
would normally get when we try to use to nothing as a verb. To use a terminology
that descends from writings of Gustav Frege, it seems to me to be easier to suspect
that the sentence "the Nothing nihilates" has a sense than to suspect that the sentence
"the Nothing nothings" does, and to be more moved to look for referents for the word
"Nothing" and to entertain the idea of a process of nihilating. A person might even
try to deduce a Carnapian protocol sentence from "the Nothing nihilates", so that "the
Nothing nihilates" will turn out not to be a pseudo-statement after all. Well, whether
"the Nothing nihilates" is nonsense or not is the sort of question Heidegger asked.
One way to avoid thinking about possible answers to such a question is that is
impossible or meaningless to state such a question in a logically correct way, and
therefore useless to look for empirical or phenomenological ways to detect whether or
not there is a kind of obverse or opposite of Being, where Being is taken to comprise
all that which is what it is, and, so to speak, which keeps on is-ing unless it is opposed
or acted on by something other than Being, which we could call Nothing or
Nothingness, and of which we could sensibly say that when Nothing acts on or
interacts with Being, then the Nothing nihilates. Many people believe and have
believed that such a question has been or can be answered, and who guide and behave
themselves accordingly, and who may produce statements intended to communicate
that answer and which they take to have some kind of empirical or phenomenological
foundation open to use by all who want to apply them. Of course, I am thinking about
the age-old disparities between certain religious and metaphysical beliefs as
contrasted with age-old scientific and physical beliefs, disparities which can be and
have been described in innumerable ways, in terms of innumerable -isms and -logies.
And I am suggesting that Carnap is mainly on one side of this battle-ground, and
Heidegger is on the other side. Alas, I myself seem to be somewhere in the middle of
the battle-ground, not knowing for sure which side I'm on -- perhaps I'm on both
sides, and people on both sides will find me disloyal.

5.15. There is still one more of Heidegger's locutions that Carnap wants to
characterize as being logically incorrect, a part of a sentence which Pap translates as
"The Nothing exists only . . . because . . . " Besides making mistake of using the
word "Nothing" as a noun, says Carnap, there is a contradiction, " for even if it were
admissible to introduce "nothing" as a name or description of an entity, still the
existence of this entity would be denied in its very definition, whereas [this] sentence
goes on to affirm its existence." Thus it appears that Carnap has in mind a definition
(Definition) of "nothing" (or "the Nothing") as a noun, but evidently wants to argue
that it can't be shown to have a logically correct meaning (Bedeutung). I suppose we
can take this to be a distinction of the sort Frege recommended, and say that Carnap
here thinks that the word "the Nothing" has a sense, but doesn't have a reference (a
connotation but no denotation, an intension but no extension). This ties in with what
I said in the previous sentence. I tried to make some sense out of the word "the
Nothing", but I tried to leave open the question of whether or not the word refers in
some empirical or phenomenological way, and also to hint that whether or not it is
taken to refer may depend on who is making the test. There may not exist a
conclusive answer to this question which is accessible by all people, or otherwise put,
there may not be an objective answer, and answers must remain subjective, although
this need not mean solipsistic, since there will be (and, of course, there are and have
been) numerous people who agree to one answer, and numerous people who agree to
another, and still other people who agree to still another answer, and so on. And there
will be numerous people (such as myself) who simply haven't picked any one answer
to agree to, and may even suspect that they will never find a definite answer (logically
correct or not) to which they will agree. These points of view could be described in
terms of countless -isms and -logies and religious faiths and scientific theories, and
indeed have been and continue to be described in such terms. However, I will not
attempt this here.

5.16. Carnap goes on to offer some arguments against some defenses of what
metaphysicians do. Some of the anticipated defenses he undertakes to refute are
related to comments I have made above, which while not intended to defend what
metaphysicians do, my comments were intended to question what Carnap says
metaphysicians do, and therefore my comments might be construed as or lead to such
defenses. In any case, Carnap suggests first that Heidegger may have had in mind a
meaning for the word "nothing" which was "entirely different from the customary
one", an eventuality I have spoken of above. Here Carnap refers to Heidegger's
statements in Was ist Metaphysik? (which he doesn't quote) to the effect that "anxiety
[Angst] reveals the Nothing, that the Nothing is present as such in anxiety". From
this, Carnap concludes that "here the word 'nothing' seems to refer to a certain
emotional constitution, possibly of a religious sort, or something or other that
underlies such emotions", and he says that if this were the case, then there would be
no logical errors in the words of Heidegger that Carnap quoted from Was ist
Metaphysik?. Thus Carnap assumes here a familiar sort of distinction between
emotive and cognitive statements, between statements which describe some sort of
feelings one has not arrived at by reasoning but in some other way, and statements
which are arrived at by reasoning in some logically correct way. Carnap rejects this
defense of metaphysics by pointing to the first sentence in the quotation that he cited
from Heidegger. This sentence reads in Pap's translation, "What is to be investigated
is being only and -- nothing else' being alone and further -- nothing, solely being, and
beyond being, nothing." In the original, the sentence reads, "Erforscht werden soll
das Seiende nur und sonst - nichts; das Seiende allein und weiter nichts; das Seiende
einzig und darüber hinaus -- nichts. If we take it that Heidegger intends Seiende to
refer to all and everything which exists in some empirical or phenomenal way, then
one reasonable inference is that Heidegger has announced that he will be talking
about what exists or subsists or reveals itself in some way other than empirical or
phenomenal (the latter perhaps in some Husserlian sense). And indeed, as Carnap
notes, Heidegger goes on to assert that Angst (anxiety, fear, dread) reveals das
Nichts. Heidegger does say that Angst reveals nichts, but that it reveals das Nichts.
After the sentence of Heidegger's I just quoted, Heidegger's next sentence is the
famous or infamous sentence "Was gibt es um dieses Nichts", "What is it about this
Nothing". That is, Heidegger has given the name das Nichts, "the Nothing, to that
which he claims Angst reveals to people in a way different than the way Being is
revealed to people. Carnap, on the other hand, infers from Heidegger's statement that
Heidegger has announced that he will talk only about all and everything that exists
and about nothing beyond that, and that the word nichts here "has the usual meaning
of a logical particle that serves for the formulation of a negative existential
statement". So Carnap evidently concludes that Heidegger has announced that he will
only talk about what exists, and that therefore Heidegger has announced that he will
not be talking about what does not exist, and that yet Heidegger goes on to do just
that, in answer to the question "Was gibt es um dieses Nichts". It seems to me that
Carnap has made here a reasonable inference from these statements by Heidegger,
provided that he has interpreted the word "Seiende" differently from Heidegger.
Moreover, it seems to me that the statements in question in isolation can be
interpreted in either of the two ways I have indicated, and the two interpretations will
both be logically correct. As usual, the sense and reference of statements (if any) will
depend on context, and it is all too easy to get different and possibly contradictory
interpretations of statements by not taking into consideration sufficiently broad or
detailed contexts in which the statements were (or are) made.

5.17. Carnap says that any doubts about whether or not he (or you) may have
misunderstood Heidegger "gets completely dissolved" when we consider something
further that Heidegger has said about the use of logic: Question and answer in regard
to the Nothing are equally absurd in themselves . . . The fundamental rule of
thinking commonly appealed to, the law of prohibited contradiction, general 'logic'
destroys this question. . . . If thus the power of the understanding in the field of
questions concerning Nothing and Being is broken, then the fate of the sovereignty of
'logic' within philosophy is thereby decided as wee. The very idea of 'logic' dissolves
in the whirl of a more basic questioning.

In the German, the first sentence of this quotation is "Frage und Antwort im Hinblick
auf das Nichts sind gleicherweise in sich widersinnig", another possible translation of
which is "Question and answer with regard to the Nothing are likewise paradoxical
in themselves". The context of this quotation isn't given by Carnap, and I don't know
what the "likewise" may have referred back to; the same may be said about the
translation "equally" of "gleicherweise" that Pap used. In any case, Carnap asks "will
sober science condone the whirl of counter-logical questioning?" Carnap takes as an
answer to this Heidegger's statement that "The alleged sobriety and superiority of
science becomes ridiculous if it does not take the Nothing seriously." (I note that
"sober" and "sobriety" here are Pap's translations of nüchterne and Nüchternheit,
which could also be translated by "matter-of-fact" or even "pragmatic", along with
corresponding nouns.) Carnap concludes: "Thus we find here a good confirmation of
our thesis; a metaphysician himself here states that his questions and answers are
irreconcilable with logic and the scientific way of thinking."

5.18. What comes to my mind now is that Heidegger may have been thinking of the
sort of thing I described in the paragraph before last, concerning how Carnap seems
to have interpreted the statements of Heidegger that Carnap was criticizing. I said
that Carnap's interpretation seemed valid in one context, but I described another
conflicting interpretation which could be made in a different context. Along these
lines, if one were to want to be charitable to Heidegger, one could take what
Heidegger intended the statements quoted in the paragraph to say was something like
this: We shouldn't give up asking and answering questions about "the Nothing"
because some interpretations of some questions and answers about "the Nothing"
involve violations of the logical "law of non-contradiction". That is, one could take
Heidegger to have recommended, none too clearly, that the authority which many
ascribe to so-called positive science (Wissenschaft), and to traditional laws of logic
shouldn't, by itself, make us give up asking and trying to answer the sort of questions
asked by metaphysicians, or at least by some metaphysicians, such as certain ancient
Greeks. But Carnap speaks against such a justification for doing metaphysics. He
does so not, he says, because he is rejecting metaphysics as "mere speculation" or
"fairy tales" or "superstition". These, he says, may not conflict with logic, although
they may conflict with experience. For metaphysical statements, says Carnap, are
"meaningless sequences of words". Carnap makes a similar objection to defenders of
doing metaphysics who argue that human beings or any other "finite beings" are
limited in such a way that it is impossible for them to find answers to metaphysical
questions, but that such questions are nevertheless meaningful, but which a being
with higher or perfect knowledge could answer. Carnap again argues on the basis of
meaninglessness and says that "if the meaning of a word cannot be specified, or if the
sequence of words does not accord with the rules of syntax, then one has not even
asked a question. . . . Where there is no question, not even an omniscient being can
give an answer." To a defender of metaphysics who says that a higher being might
have the power to communicate "new knowledge" (presumably not by way of
answers to meaningless questions, but in some other way, such as by what religious
people call revelation), Carnap replies that if they communicate something to people
but the people don't or perhaps can't know how to verify what has been
communicated, then "no information has been communicated to us, but merely verbal
sounds devoid of meaning though possibly associated with images." Presumably here
"to verify" refers to being able to test in some way by empirical means which can be
employed by any competent person, and whose results will be agreed on by all such
persons, or at least some significant numbers of them, and at least for some
significant period of time. Carnap says that "what we do not know for certain, we
may come to know with greater certainty through the assistance of other beings; but
what is unintelligible, meaningless for us, cannot become meaningful through
someone else's assistance, however vast his knowledge might be. Therefore no god
and no devil can give us metaphysical knowledge."

5.19. It seems, however, that some metaphysical statements which are meaningless
according according to Carnap's criteria might be revealed by a higher being to be
empirically meaningful and objectively or intersubjectively shareable, according to
criteria which aren't empirically based in the sense that Carnap understands the term
"empirical. Historically, numerous people have made claims along these lines, and in
some cases groups of people have acted according to such a basis, at least sometimes
with results which appear to me to be open even to empirical verification of the sort
Carnap has in mind, at least so far as externally observable behavior of the people
are concerned, even though there might be non-communicable meanings of their
statements might not open to empirical verification in the sense of Carnap, since
Carnap requires meanings to be communicable. It strikes me that Carnap is
describing a program he has undertaken for restricting ordinary languages and
constructing artificial (and restrictive) languages useful for some purposes, and it
strikes me that one may well agree with him that confining oneself to linguistic uses
and rules of the sort he proposes in his Logische Aufbau der Sprache will affect how
one interprets what a class of people he calls metaphysicians have said and continue
to say. The same may be said for his work after he wrote his 1932 article on how to
cure oneself of metaphysics. But as I have tried to adumbrate in my discussions
above, there are numerous openings (or gaps) which can arouse doubts about whether
applying his particular recommendations will enable people to eliminate or overcome
doing what Carnap calls metaphysics, even in such austere fields of work as the
natural sciences and mathematics. Of course, one can handily use some of his work
to criticize metaphysicians, and even to ridicule them, but on the face of it, if a person
doesn't think metaphysicians in general aren't saying anything of scientific interest, or
are talking a lot of nonsense, it would be more comfortable for the person just to stay
away from metaphysics (and maybe from metaphysicians), so far as the person can,
than for the person to spend a lot of time and effort making sure that the syntax and
semantics and theory of meaning of the languages he or she uses, at least where
reasoning is involved, obeys a complicated set of rules, to be tested by translating
ordinary languages into symbolic ones. However, there are people who think that
metaphysical language of the sort Carnap criticizes is not only meaningless, but also
pernicious. And there are people who find regard metaphysical language of this sort
to be close for comfort to certain kinds of theological or religious language.

5.20. There is more to Carnap's article. There is a section rather peremptorily

entitled "Meaninglessness of all Metaphysics". Here Carnap remarks that "perhaps
the majority of the logical mistakes that are committed when pseudo-statements are
made, are based on the logical faults infecting the use of the word 'to be' [sein]", and
corresponding words in other languages. He speaks about the ambiguity of this word
and its inflections in ordinary usage, and the way he talks, it seems that he would like
to eliminate all ambiguity of words in his artificial languages. He speaks about "type
confusion", involving predicates of different types, as illustrated by his example
"Caesar is a prime number". Here it appears that he has in mind that predicates
should be regarded as functions which have differing admissible domains. Then
Carnap makes this rather startling claim: Having found that many metaphysical
statements are meaningless, we confront the question whether there is not perhaps a
core of meaningful statements in metaphysics which would remain after elimination
of all the meaningless ones. . . . But actually the situation is that meaningful
metaphysical statements are impossible. This follows from the task which
metaphysics sets itself; to discover and formulate a kind of knowledge which is not
accessible to empirical science.

So Carnap makes himself clear. Any kind of knowledge which is not accessible to
empirical knowledge is, he says, meaningless. He goes on to discuss how what
Wittgenstein called "tautologies", stated to be roughly the same as Immanuel Kant's
"analytic judgments" are not factual statements but only serve to transform factual
statements. These and their negations are or include the rules of logic, and are said to
true or false simply because of their form. They are to be included among the
meaningful statements. The only other kind of meaningful statements are said to
belong to the domain of empirical science. Then, says Carnap: Since metaphysics
does not want to assert analytic propositions, nor to fall within the domain of
empirical science, it is compelled to employ words for which no criteria of
application are specified and which are therefore devoid of sense, or else to combine
meaningful words in such a way that neither an analytic (or contradictory) statement
nor an empirical statement is produced.

What freedom! How liberating! How much of the work of philosophers and
theologians and other speculators of that sort is swept aside! If a person has been
attracted to a study of traditional philosophies, how much easier it has become. But
wait. Carnap asks: But what, then is left over for philosophy, if all statements
whatever that assert something are of an empirical nature and belong to factual
science? What remains is not statements, nor a thoery, nor a system, but only a
method; the method of logical analysis.
So if you're a university student with a penchant for philosophizing, be sure to
become proficient enough in mathematics or some empirical science, as well as in
logic, so you will have something to do -- that is, something to do that's meaningful.

5.21. Finally, Carnap talks about metaphysics as "expression of an attitude toward

life", and classifies it as an inferior kind of art. It seems that what artists do is also
meaningless in Carnap's sense, but nevertheless the arts furnish adequate means for
expressing one's attitude toward life, whereas metaphysics doesn't. Lyrical poets, for
example, are said not to be conveying meanings in their poems, but only expressing
attitudes. Carnap observes that perhaps music is the purist means of expression of
attitudes toward life because it is entirely free from any reference to objects. The
harmonious feeling or attitude, which the metaphysician tries to express in a monistic
system, is more clearly expressed in the music of Mozart. And when a metaphysician
gives verbal expression to his dualistic-heroic attitude towards life in a dualistic
system, is it not perhaps because he lacks the ability of a Beethoven to express this
attitude in an adequate medium? Metaphysicians are musicians without musical
ability.

There's an old saying used to indicate that someone isn't just fooling around, but is
saying something that is -- well, saying something meaningful or valid: "He (or she)
isn't just whistling Dixie!". This refers of course to an old song dear to Southerners in
the USA, prominent as a battle song in that Lost Cause known as the Civil War, or the
War Between the States, or the Great Rebellion, or the War of Northern Aggression,
or the American Iliad. It appears that Carnap thinks metaphysicians are just whistling
Dixie, although dreadfully out of tune.