Why did logical positivists connect a sentence’s meaning to its possible verification by experience?

Logical positivists connected a sentence’s meaning to its possible verification by experience because they sought to establish a rigorous criterion for distinguishing between cognitively meaningful statements and those that are meaningless.12

For the Vienna Circle, the primary task of philosophy was the critique of language and the clarification of scientific concepts. They argued that a non-tautological statement possesses factual meaning only if there are observable conditions that could determine its truth or falsity. This verifiability principle was intended to exclude metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic assertions from the realm of genuine knowledge, as these statements often lack empirical content and cannot be tested through observation or experiment.321456

By grounding meaning in experience, logical positivists aimed to unify the sciences and eliminate what they viewed as the sterile, confused pronouncements of traditional metaphysics. They maintained that if a statement makes no difference in principle to our experience, it lacks cognitive significance, even if it may still serve to express emotions or influence conduct.32614