Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Philosophia Scientiae, cilt.19, sa.1, ss.115-126, 2015 (Scopus)
Can the abstract entities be designated ? While the empiricists usually took the positive answer to this question as the first step toward Platonism, in his "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" [Carnap 1950], Carnap tried to make a reconciliation between the language referring to abstract entities on the one hand, and empiricism on the other. In this paper, firstly, I show that the ingenuity of Carnap's approach notwithstanding, it is prone to criticism from different aspects. But I also show how, even without leaving the empiricist research program, the shortcomings could be amended. Following Carnap's 1950 outset, and adding some apparently untasteful (Meinongian) ingredients, I will sketch a refined way for dealing with the problem of existence of abstract entities within the framework of the philosophy of empiricism.