¿Con sentido o sin sentido? En torno a un argumento de Carnap

Abstract

In his seminal article “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” (1950) Rudolf Carnap proposes an argument to support the conclusion that certain sentences, among which some that belong to metaphysics, lack linguistic meaning. Carnap’s article is generally discussed as part of a wider debate between Carnap and Quine during the 50’s. In this paper my aim is threefold: first, to briefly review the Carnap-Quine debate, with the purpose of clarifying Carnap’s dialectical purposes in the article mentioned; second, I argue that Carnap’s strategy for detecting meaninglessness fails; and finally, I suggest a possible way in which Carnap’s argument could be recast in externalist meta-semantic terms.