Carnap's Relativised A Priori and Ontology

Abstract

The paper reconstructs Carnap's epistemological and ontological ideas stressing the link between these ideas and the most general tenets of Logical Empiricism (negation of the Kantian theory of synthetic a priori judgments, linguistic theory of the a priori, influence of Poincaré's conventionalism, principle of verification, refusal of metaphysical absolutism). From this point of view it also discusses both the Carnap/Quine debate on analyticity and ontology and the difference between Carnap and the ‘young' Reichenbach on the nature of the relativised a priori.