The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language

November 7, 2025 | 1,164 words | 6min read

Paper Title: The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language

Link to Paper: https://philarchive.org/rec/TEO

Date: 1959

Paper Type: Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics

Short Abstract: In this paper Rudolf Carnap argues that all talk about metaphysics is meaningless.

1. Introduction

Throughout history, there have always been philosophers who contended that metaphysics is false or senseless.

The development of modern logic has made it possible to better investigate the question of the meaning of metaphysics and to radically eliminate it.

When Carnap says that questions of metaphysics are meaningless, he means it in the strictest sense, like questions that are completely uninteresting, such as “What is the average weight of the people whose telephone number ends with a 3?” or false statements like “In 1910 Vienna had 6 inhabitants.”

Sentences are meaningless if they do not, within a specified language, constitute a statement.

There are two types of pseudo-statements:

• They either contain a word that has no meaning but is believed to have one,
• or the words in the statement are meaningful individually, but together they do not make sense.

2. Meaning of Words

What is the meaning of a word?

First, the syntax of the word must be fixed. Second, for an elementary sentence s containing the word, the following questions must be answered:

1. From which sentences is s deducible, and which sentences are deducible from s?
2. Under what conditions is s supposed to be true or false?
3. How is s to be verified?
4. What is the meaning of s?

In the case of many words, especially scientific ones, it is possible to specify their meaning by reduction to other words (definitions), e.g. bachelor → unmarried man. In this way, every word in a language is reduced to other words until we reach so-called observation sentences.

For example, let’s assume someone invents the word babig and says that there are things that are babig. To know the meaning of this word, we must know how, in a concrete case, it is possible to determine whether something is babig or not. If the person cannot answer this question, then the word is meaningless.

3. Metaphysical Words and Meaning

Many metaphysical words do not fulfill the criteria specified above.

One example is God, which is even more difficult because there are many forms ans usages: historical uses, mythological, theological, and so on.

In the metaphysical use, God is something “above” humans, but this is an illusory definition, because it leads back to other metaphysical words such as ground, the absolute, and so on. The elemental sentences would need to be of the form “x is God,” but metaphysical philosophers avoid this form.

Other terms without meaning include the idea, the unconditioned, the infinite, spirit, non-being, being-in-itself, and so on.

The metaphysician cannot specify empirical truth conditions. If they say these words mean something, we know that this is merely a synonym for other illusory words or simply an expression of feeling.

4. Metaphysical Pseudo-Statements

Let’s look at one metaphysical sentence from Heidegger:

“What is to be investigated is being only and—nothing else; being alone and further—nothing; solely being, and beyond being—nothing. What about this Nothing? … Does Nothing exist only because the Not, i.e. negation, exists? Or is it the other way around? Does negation and the Not exist only because the Nothing exists?”

This sentence does not adhere to the criteria stated above.

It uses the word nothing as a noun. In a correct language, nothing is not a particular name but a logical form of a sentence that serves a specific purpose.

Phrases like to nothing are meaningless. Besides nothing being used as a noun (which is incorrect), the sentence also involves a contradiction. Even if it were possible to introduce nothing as a name, the existence of this entity would be denied by its very definition, yet the sentence goes on to affirm its existence.

Carnap regards metaphysics not as mere speculation or fairy tale. Statements in fairy tales do not conflict with logic, only with experience; fairy tales are perfectly meaningful even though they are false.

On the other hand, metaphysics is not merely superstition. It is possible to believe in true or false propositions, but metaphysics consists of meaningless statements.

Metaphysics is not even acceptable as working hypotheses, because a hypothesis can be deduced to empirical statements, metaphysical claims cannot.

5. Meaninglessness of All Metaphysics

The results shown so far can be generalized to all metaphysics, for example, to Hegel.

The most common logical mistake in metaphysics concerns the word to be, which has two usages: as a predicate (“I am hungry”) and to designate existence (“I am”). This leads to errors.

Existence, the second usage of the word, has long been known, at least since Kant, not to be a property. This is where the problems of metaphysics often arise.

One such example is Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum.”, which treats existence like a property.

The verdict of meaninglessness also applies to movements such as:

• realism
• subjective idealism
• solipsism
• phenomenalism
• positivism (in its earliest sense)

What then is left of philosophy? Only the philosophical method and its application. Its positive use is to clarify meaningful concepts and propositions, and to lay the logical foundations for science and mathematics.

6. Metaphysics as Expression of an Attitude Toward Life

What, then, is metaphysics? Metaphysics is art, it is for people who cannot express themselves through music.

This can be seen in the fact that the metaphysical philosopher who made the fewest logical errors is also the most artistic: Nietzsche.

My Criticism

Four Criticisms:

1. He says something like “all metaphysics is meaningless,” but this statement is self-defeating, because all philosophy presupposes metaphysics. For example, Carnap relies on logic. But there are different logical systems (e.g. fuzzy logic). His choice to use classical logic is itself a metaphysical choice.
2. When he lists the criteria for what a statement needs in order to have meaning, one of them is that it must be falsifiable. This is the famous criterion introduced to determine whether something is scientific. However, even the author of that paper later admitted that his criterion is not perfect and may already exclude theories that could still be considered scientific. Carnap, by adding further criteria, makes it even stricter.
3. Wittgenstein says that the meaning of language arises from its usage. If we talk about religion, God, or metaphysics as if these have meaning, then whatever that meaning is, it must include metaphysics, simply because of how the words are used.
4. When Carnap criticizes Heidegger’s sentence about “nothing,” he analyzes it logically. This is misguided, because even Heidegger himself admits that it is not a logical statement. Rather, whenever we have a theory or system that breaks down, it reveals an aspect we had not accounted. For example, Newtonian gravity giving way to Einsteinian gravity. Heidegger does something similar: his sentence is meant to be illogical, because it demonstrates the limits of language itself, pointing toward an aspect that cannot be captured by language.

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