According to the positivists, when you say “it’s hotter outside than it is in here,” you really mean “if you go outside, you will feel hotter than you do in here.” The statement’s meaning is the method of verifying it empirically—and if there’s no way of verifying a statement against your senses, then that statement has no meaning. So abstruse statements like Hegel’s pronouncements about substance and form, and other metaphysical claims like “there is a God,” are meaningless, since they make no contact with the observable world.
