Logical Povitism

Just as the empiricists thought that complex ideas had meaning because they were compounded out of simple ideas, and that simple ideas had meaning because they had a direct connection with experience (namely being copies of it), so the positivists thought that some sentences had meaning because they were definable in terms of other sentences, and that at the "bottom" one would find basic sentences, sentences which had their meaning because of their direct connection with experience (in this case being reports of it rather than copies of it). For the positivists these basic sentences were observation sentences. The connection between the world and language thus boils down to a connection between observation sentences, on the one hand, and experiences--the observations reported by observation sentences--on the other. Of course, there is more to the world than experience, and more to language than observation sentences, but the idea is that the world is connected to language only via experience, and experience is connected to the rest of language only via observation sentences.