 For Carnap, the empiricist criterion of significance was an analytic principle, but in a very special sense. As a convention, the criterion had the standing of an analytic statement, but it was not a formally specifiable framework principle of the language Ln to which it pertained. Properly formulated, it was a semantic principle concerning Ln that was statable only in its meta-language Ln+1. To argue that the criterion itself is meaningless because it has no standing in Ln is to commit a category mistake, for meta-linguistic assertions need not have counterparts in their object languages (Goldfarb 1997, Creath 2004, Richardson 2004). Nor would it be correct to claim that the criterion hides circular reasoning, allegedly because its rejection of the meaningless depends on an unquestioned notion of experiential fact as self-explanatory (when such fact is still to be constituted). Importantly, Carnap’s language constructor does not start with fixed notions of what is empirical (rather than formal) or what is given (rather than assumed or inferred), but from the beginning allows a plurality of perspectives on these distinctions (Ricketts 1994). Carnap’s empiricist criterion of significance is precisely this: an explication, a proposal for how empiricists may wish to speak. It is not an explanation of how meaning arises from what is not meaningful in itself. Unlike theorists who wish to explain how meaning itself is constituted, explicationists can remain untroubled by the regress of formal semantics with Tarskian strictures. For them, the lack of formal closure (the incompleteness of arithmetic and the inapplicability of the truth predicate to its own language) only betokens the fact that our very own home languages cannot ever be fully explicated.