The Structure of Carnap’s Linguistic Frameworks

Ontology is charged with defining the contents of our universe, and intuition tells us that it ought to be the first project of any incipient philosophical system; after all, if a philosophy cannot even tell us what exists, how can it expect to describe the relationships between existents or offer guidance on how those existents should interact? Yet the project of answering Quine's famous three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables – " What is there? " (Quine 1961, I, p1) – is not as straightforward as it might appear to a man of unphilosophical character. Traditionally, these answers are offered through introspection – also known as armchair philosophy, also known as guessing – while more recent accounts look to scientific investigation as their guide. Regardless of which side of this particular fence one falls on, it is almost universally agreed that the project is a sensible one, and that its end is to identify the entities in which a sensible person should believe. Rudolf Carnap has another idea, both deeply pragmatic and straightforwardly empirical. It is also resoundingly unintuitive at first glance, but it does have some theoretical advantages over more traditional ontological accounts. According to Carnap, discussing a new kind of entity requires the construction of a linguistic framework, defined as a new set of rules governing the ways in which these entities are described and referenced. A linguistic framework is thus a way of organizing human communication about particular sets of experiences or observations. For every linguistic framework there exist two types of questions: internal questions, which are asked and answered within the framework, and external questions asked of the larger system within which the entities are supposed to exist.