ABSTRACT
This chapter explains Rudolf Carnap's notion of a linguistic framework. It moves away from A. J. Ayer's conception of the distinction between empirically verifiable and analytic statements, and takes up another historically influential angle on that distinction, Carnap's famous distinction between "internal" and "external" questions. According to the criterion suggested by the logical positivists, there are two ways in which a sentence can be literally significant. The first type of statement is dealt with by positivists' verification principle, which attempts to spell out in detail what conditions a statement has to satisfy in order to qualify as literally meaningful in virtue of being susceptible to empirical verification. The second is dealt with by the positivists' account of a priori truth: a priori truths are analytic, in the sense that they are true purely in virtue of meaning. The verification principle can be summed up in Moritz Schlick's famous slogan, "the meaning of a statement consists in its method of verification".
