 We are now in a position to return to a final criticism of the search for a criterion of empiricist significance. Much has been made of the very status of the criterion itself (however it may be put in the end): was it empirically testable? It is common to claim that it is not and therefore to consign it to insignificance in turn, following Putnam (1981a, 1981b). The question arises whether this is to overlook the fact  that the criterion of significance was put forward not as an empirical claim but as a meta-theoretical proposal for how to delimit empiricist languages from non-empiricist ones. Again, pursuing this line of inquiry is not to deny that the meaning criterion may have been understood by some members of the Circle in such a way that it became liable to charges of self-refutation. Even if that were the case, the reason for this may be found not in the very idea of such a criterion, but in the contradictory status of the Tractarian “elucidations” to which the criterion was likened. (The legitimacy of these elucidations was at issue already in the debates that divided the Circle in the early 1930s; see, e.g., Neurath 1932a.) What will be considered here is primarily the view of Carnap, who from 1932 onwards put his philosophical theses in the form of “proposals” for alternative language forms, but how the pragmatist alternative fares will also be considered. Finally, we will consider where this does leave neopositivist anti-metaphysics.