ABSTRACT
A. J. Ayer’s positivism furnishes an empiricist theory of meaning designed to champion science and eliminate metaphysics; it has difficulty accomplishing each since it seems that the favored claims of science are not sufficiently different in their method of verification from the vilified claims of metaphysics. Rudolf Carnap’s addresses these issues via his key notions of linguistic frameworks, internal/external questions, and formal/material modes of expression. Convention comes to the fore in the positivist account of a priori truths: all a priori truths are analytic and analytic truths express the conventionally determined meaning relations between the concepts making up the statement in question. A linguistic framework comprises three types of statements: analytic truths, non-observation sentences, and observation sentences. For Carnap, different linguistic frameworks have different methods of verification, for example the framework of thing-words uses sensory experience, and the framework of number-words uses the a priori proof procedures of number theory.
