The aim Carnap states in §1 makes §4 the heart of this paper. However, for our purposes, the more general discussion in §§2-3 is the most important part. It represents a recasting of Carnap’s version of logical positivist view of understanding in the semantic form he began to give it during WWII, and it will the target of the criticisms by Quine that we will discuss on Wed. and Fri.

The key ideas for the whole paper—the concept of linguistic frameworks and the distinction between internal and external questions—come out very quickly in §2, and you can expect our discussion to center on his examples of them.

The central place Carnap gives to semantics in this paper was occupied in the 1930s by syntax. He made a range of points in those terms that are roughly analogous to the ones he makes here, and I’ll sketch them so they are available for comparison. In the 1930s, he described the proper concern of philosophy as the “logical syntax of language” (which was also the title of his major work of the period). He spoke of rules of “syntax” as the basis for a priori knowledge, and his critique of metaphysics used a distinction between speech in the “formal” and “material mode.” According to him, when we speak in the formal mode (one of his examples: “The word ‘rose’ is a thing-word”), we present statements that are really about syntax as clearly syntactic. On the other hand, speaking in the material mode (e.g., “The rose is a thing”) presents such statements as if they were comparable to ordinary synthetic statements (e.g., “The rose is red”). He referred to the latter as “object sentences,” labeling material-mode claims as “pseudo-object-sentences” or “quasi-syntactical sentences.” He held that a key source of philosophical problems was a failure to recognize the true syntactic character of material mode statements.