A theory of meaningfulness sets the conditions under which a sentence counts as cognitively significant. It does not say what a meaningful sentence means or what facts give it that meaning. The verificationist answers make cognitive significance depend on analyticity or on the possibility of empirical test, and they disagree over how strong that test must be.
Philosophy of Language
Meaningful and Meaningless Statements
What makes a sentence cognitively meaningful rather than meaningless?
Positions
- Confirmability Criterion
A sentence is cognitively meaningful if observation could confirm or disconfirm it to some degree, even though no finite body of observation could conclusively verify it.
Held by Logical Positivism
- Verificationism
A sentence is cognitively meaningful if and only if it is analytic or could in principle be conclusively verified by observation.
Held by Logical Positivism
Methods used to investigate this question
- Formalization
Formalization translates claims, arguments, or theories into an explicit logical or mathematical representation so that their structure can be tested with formal tools.