verificationism

Verificationism was a movement in Western philosophy—in particular, analytic philosophy—that emerged in the 1920s by the efforts of a group of philosophers known as the logical positivists, who aimed to formulate criteria to ensure philosophical statements' meaningfulness and to objectively assess their falsity or truth. Initially, logical positivists sought a universal language whereby both ordinary language and physics—thereby all of the empirical sciences—could be represented formally via symbolic logic, whereupon the empirical sciences' basis in observation or experience could be clearly discerned and mimicked by philosophy.