Heidegger and Carnap

Bill has a recent post in which he defends Heidegger's metaphysics against Carnap's deflationary pinpricks.  He starts with the celebrated ex nihilo, nihil fit, 'Out of nothing, nothing comes.'  Carnap's contention is that 'nothing' is not a name but rather a bit of special logical syntax, which can be expanded into quantification and negation.   Thus 'nothing comes' means 'not something comes'.  More formally, ~∃x. x comes, which is equivalent to ∀x. ~x comes.  Bill (and Heidegger) accept that the second 'nothing' in  ex nihilo, nihil fit does indeed succumb to this treatment.  The problem comes with the first 'nothing'.  Let's read our sentence as 'If nothing exists, then nothing can arise'.   Bill's case is that 'nothing exists' is perfectly meaningful but cannot be reparsed into negation and quantification à la Carnap.  This leaves a 'substantive' use of 'nothing' from which Heidegger can launch his metaphysical balloon.

My problem with this is that I'm not sure that Carnap's procedure applies even to the second 'nothing'.  The sense of 'comes' here is not that of 'nobody comes to my parties', but rather of 'becomes' or 'will exist'.  So the sense of the consequent is that of the antecedent, but in the future tense. Hence, if Carnap does not apply to the antecedent, as Bill insists, then I don't see how it does apply to the consequent.

Does this give Heidegger permission to cast off or must he remain tethered?  The latter, I think.  For if we can allow ourselves an elementary notion of counting in our Carnapian 'logically correct language' then we can translate  'nothing exists'  as 'there are zero things' and 'something exists' as 'there is at least one thing'.  The supposedly 'substantive' term 'nothing' once more disappears into the logic, or, rather, the arithmetic.

I have two further minor comments on Bill's piece.  He says,

And I suggested that 'nothing' could name the total absence of all beings. If this total absence is a possibility, as it would be if every being is a contingent being, then Nothing (das Nichts) would have some 'reality,' if only the reality of a mere possibility.

Does it follow from a universal contingency that nothingness is a possibility?  It's certainly a conceivability.  However, the world might be such that there has to be something even though it is contingent which thing that something is.  Think of a Max Black world consisting of a single metal sphere.  But that sphere could be iron, zinc, copper, etc.

Thus when I assert that nothing is in my pocket, I presuppose that things exist and the content of my assertion is that no one of these existing things is in my pocket.

We don't have to presuppose this.  We could be just saying that there are zero things in our pocket. An appeal to counting, in other words.  Or, better, perhaps, to 'taking away'. Zero is a relatively late invention.