 Carnap’s general recipe for avoiding undue commitments (while pursuing his investigations of various language forms, including the intensional ones Quine frowned upon) was given in terms of the distinction between so-called internal and external questions (1950a). Given the adoption of a logico-linguistic framework, we can state the facts in accordance with what that framework allows us to say. Given any of the languages of arithmetic, say, we can state as arithmetical fact whatever we can prove in them; to say that there are numbers, however, is at best to express the fact that numbers are a basic category of that framework (irrespective of whether they are logically derived from a still more basic category). As to whether certain special types of numbers exist (in the deflated sense), that depends on the expressive power of the framework at hand and on whether the relevant facts can be proven. Analogous considerations apply to the existence of physical things (the external world) given the logico-linguistic frameworks of everyday discourse and empirical science. (The near-tautologous nature of these categorical claims in Carnap’s hands echoes his earlier diagnosis of metaphysical claims as pseudo-statements; see also 1934/37, Part V.A.) Unlike such internal questions, however, external questions, questions whether numbers or electrons “really exist” irrespective of any framework, are ruled out as illegitimate and meaningless. The only way in which sense could be given to them was to read them as pragmatic questions concerned with the utility of talk about numbers or electrons, of adopting certain frameworks. Carnap clearly retained his basic position: existence claims remain the province of science and there must be seen as mediated by the available conceptual tools of inquiry. Logicians of science are in no position to double-guess the scientists in their own proper domain. (Needless to say, Quine 1951b opposed the internal/external distinction as much as his 1951a opposed the analytic/synthetic distinction.)