Some of the issues affecting structuralism that I discuss...

Some of the issues affecting structuralism that I discuss below also certainly affect the prospects for the success of Chomsky’s classic project.

Nevertheless I have largely left the projects of transformational linguistics out of discussion, since (whatever the successes of their description of an underlying universal grammar of phrase structure and sentence formation) they have had great difficulty handling the issue of the relationship of the syntax they describe to the semantics or meanings of ordinary terms and utterances. (For some discussion, see, e.g., Searle (1972)).

[^6] In what follows, I use “structure” to mean any totality of elements that, minimally, i) bear intelligible relations of identity, similarity, and difference to one another and ii) are intelligibly interconnected by rules, regularities, or principles governing or underlying these relations. [^7] Hahn, Neurath, et. al (1929), p. [^309]: [^8] Hahn, Neurath, et. al (1929), pp. 306-[^307]: [^9] Cf.

Carnap’s statement in the 1932 article “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language:” “The researches of applied logic or the theory of knowledge, which aim at clarifying the cognitive content of scientific statements and thereby the meanings of the terms that occur in the statements, by means of logical analysis, lead to a positive and a negative result.

The positive result is worked out in the domain of empirical science; the various concepts of the various branches of science are clarified; their formal-logical and epistemological connections are made explicit. In the domain of metaphysics, including all philosophy of value and normative theory, logical analysis yields the negative result that the alleged statements in this domain are entirely meaningless.

Therewith a radical elimination of metaphysics is attained, which was not yet possible from the earlier antimetaphysical standpoints.” (Carnap 1932a, pp. 60-61). [^10] It is instructive to compare Moritz Schlick’s description, written in 1931, of the revolution in philosophy to which he saw the new logical methods as leading: “There are consequently no questions which are in principle unanswerable, no problems which are in principle insoluble.

What have been considered such up to now are not genuine questions, but meaningless sequences of words.