 But since the internal general questions are completely trivial they can’t be what the philosophers and metaphysicians are after when they ask the ontological question ‘Are there numbers?’ The philosophers aim to ask a difficult and deep question, not a trivial one. What the philosophers aim to ask, according to Carnap, is not a question internal to the framework, but external to it. They aim to ask whether the framework correctly corresponds to reality, whether or not there really are numbers. However, the words used in the question ‘Are there numbers?’ only have meaning within the framework of talk about numbers, and thus if they are meaningful at all they form an internal question, with a trivial answer. The external questions that the metaphysician tries to ask are meaningless. Ontology, the philosophical discipline that tries to answer hard questions about what there really is is based on a mistake. The question it tries to answer are meaningless questions, and this enterprise should be abandoned. The words ‘Are there numbers?’ thus can be used in two ways: as an internal question, in which case the answer is trivially ‘yes’, but this has nothing to do with metaphysics or ontology, or as an external question, which is the one the philosophers are trying to ask, but which is meaningless. Philosophers should thus not be concerned with (O2), which is a discipline that tries to answer meaningless questions, but with (L1), which is a discipline that, in part, develops frameworks for science to use to formulate and answer real questions. Or so Carnap’s project. Carnap’s ideas about ontology and meta-ontology are developed in his classic essay (Carnap 1956b). A nice summary of Carnap’s views can be found in his intellectual autobiography (Carnap 1963).