The verification theory of meaning aims to characterize what it is for a sentence to be meaningful and also what kind of abstract object the Meaning of a sentence is. A brief outline is given by Rudolf Carnap, one of the theory's most prominent defenders:
If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is. […] thus the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible. [1: 420]
In short, the verification theory of meaning claims that the meaning of a sentence is the method of its verification.
Verificationism can only be fully appreciated in the larger context of the philosophical credo it emerged from, namely twentieth Century logicalempiricism (also known as logical.
