The Bernays-Müller debate was a dispute in the early 1920s between Paul Bernays and Aloys Müller regarding various philosophical issues related to “Hilbert’s program.” The debate is sometimes mentioned as a sidenote in discussions of Hilbert’s program, but there is little or no discussion of the debate itself in the secondary literature. This article aims to fill this gap and to provide a detailed analysis of the background of the debate, its contents, and the impact on its protagonists.

Huw Price has sketched a program for a globalized expressivism in support of which he has repeatedly invoked Rudolf Carnap. This paper argues that this is entirely appropriate, as Carnap had something quite similar in mind. However, it also argues that Price’s recent attempts to integrate Robert Brandom’s inferentialism to this program are less successful, and that a more empirically-oriented descriptive pragmatics along Carnapian lines would be a better fit with his original program than Brandom’s explicitly hermeneutical agenda.