 Still, some readers may wonder whether in the course of responding to the various counter-criticisms, the Vienna Circle’s position has not shifted considerably. This indeed is true: the attempt to show metaphysics strictly meaningless once and for all did not succeed. For even if Carnap’s 1956 criterion and the pragmatic approach work, they do not achieve that: Carnap’s criterion only works for constructed languages and the pragmatic one does not address the semantic issue and only works case by case. But it can be argued that while this debilitates the Vienna Circle’s most notorious claim (if understood without qualifications), it does not debilitate their entire program. That was, we recall, to defend Enlightenment reason and to counter the abuse of possibly empty but certainly ill-understood deep-sounding language in science and in public life. Their program was, to put it somewhat anachronistically, to promote epistemic empowerment. This program would have been helped by an across-the-board criterion to show metaphysics meaningless, but it can also proceed in its absence.