Topic summary
Verificationist
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Verificationism.
Protocol sentences
Verificationist accounts of meaning presuppose some class of basic sentences that provide the experiential input for testing more complex claims. Within logical empiricism these are often called observation sentences, understood (following Carl Gustav Hempel) as sentences that ascribe or deny an observable characteristic to one or more specifically named macroscopic objects; such sentences were taken to form the empirical basis for criteria of cognitive meaning.