Abstract

In the paper I consider the prospects of interpreting late Carnap view on ontology as being in part a sort of fictionalism. More precisely, I argue that the theses he maintained in the volume of The Library of Living Philosophers devoted to his philosophy , in which he concerned with semantics in general and the confirmation of existential claims, make his account of an ontologically uncommittal acceptance of existential claims, as presented in his Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology , unsatisfying. In this work, he claimed that – to put it roughly – one can accept existential claims as true relatively to rules that constitue the linguistic framework in which these claims are formulated and that from the truth relative to these rules one can’t derive any conclusion about the objective truth of these existential claims. But in the volume of The Library of Living Philosophers he adopted a new view on the nature of semantic values and took them to be extralinguistic entities. This change forced him to redefine the notion of being true relative to rules of the liguistic framework in terms of being true in admissible models of this language, where a model is an ad-missible model of a given language, if all meaning postulates of this language are satisfied in that model. This change of the view calls for an explanation of how it is possible to take some existential claims to be true in a model without accepting the existence of entities in the domain of that model. Following S. Yablo’s view ex-pressed in his Does Ontology Rest on Mistake , I suggest that one can accept the thesis that existential claims are satisfied by some extralinguistic entities in some model in a spirit of make-believe in which one makes supposition that there are such enti-ties and that they satisfy these existential claims. I also argue against propositions of interpreting Carnap as a quasi-realist on the ground that this kind of interpretation doesn’t give a justice to the distinction between internal existential claims and prag-matic external existential claims, i.e. those claims that should be treated as claims about pragmatic values of a given linguistic framework