Verifiability Principle
The most distinctive doctrine of the logical positivists was that for any sentence to be cognitively meaningful it must express a statement that is either analytic or empirically verifiable. It was allowed that sentences may have "emotive," "imperative," and other kinds of meaning (for example, "What a lovely present!" or "Bring me a glass of water!") even when they have no cognitive meaning, that is, when they do not express anything that could be true or false, or a possible subject of knowledge. But—leaving aside sentences expressing analytic statements—for a sentence to have "cognitive," "factual," "descriptive," or "literal" meaning (for example, "The sun is 93 million miles from the earth") it was held that it must express a statement that could, at least in principle, be shown to be true or false, or to some degree probable, by reference to empirical observations. The iconoclasm of the logical positivists was based on this criterion of meaning, for according to the verifiability principle a great many of the sentences of traditional philosophy (for example, "Reality is spiritual," "The moral rightness of an action is a nonempirical property," "Beauty is significant form," "God created the world for the fulfillment of his purpose") must be cognitively meaningless.
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