 Carnap’s early-1930s syntactical method of avoiding reference for terms in the philosophical metalanguage has recently been identified as the first self-consciously worked-out program of what is now often called “inferentialism” (Peregrin forthcoming), a different form of which is especially championed by Robert Brandom (1994, 2000), and has been found attractive by others (e.g., Price 2013). Though Carnap’s inferentialism had different motivations from Brandom’s program of “reference explained away” (Brandom 1984), there is clearly at least an analogous strategy at work. While Carnap himself left the syntax program in its original form behind when he went on to incorporate semantics into his overall program for scientific languages, the syntax episode with its explicitly inferentialist agenda is now viewed by some (e.g., Chalmers 2012, Peregrin forthcoming) an important innovation in its own right. Some of these commentators thus regard Carnap’s later embrace of semantics as a step backwards. That had also been the view of Neurath at the time (Uebel 2007, Mormann 1999, Carus 2019), and of Quine and others later (e.g., Goldfarb &amp; Ricketts 1992; Ricketts 1996; Goldfarb 1997). These criticisms are at least partly due to a perception that Carnap returned to a substantive conception of meaning such as the Wittgensteinian one he had dropped in 1931, but actually his conception of reference and meaning remained minimalist and schematic, much to the frustration of, e.g., Russell (1940; see Pincock 2007), who sought a substantive account of the intrinsic nature of reference (see the supplement  Semantics  for further discussion).