Okay, so there was this group of people in Vienna around the time of WWI, who wrote philosophy that became called positivism. What they said is pretty interesting, and I think it's very important. It's not widely studied today, but they did two things that are worth noting.
1. They said the meaning of something is the measurement of it. So what this means is that, regardless of what something is, your measurement of it is the meaning you get. If your measurements are accurate, then you have an accurate measurement of something and your meaning is accurate, but not the same as the thing itself. Think about what we said of human modes of perception. Human perception measures in discrete intervals. The Universe really isn't that way.
2. They had a huge influence on mathematics by codifying a logical calculus that is still used in an altered form today.
3. They said that for a claim to be scientific, it has to be able to be verified. That was called verifiability.
Later, Karl Popper and some others did some work on logical positivism that essentially revised the way we look at science. They came up with negative proof, and the idea that in order for a claim to be scientific, it had to be possible to disprove it. If it can't be disproven at all, regardless of it's truth, then it's not a scientific claim. That is approaching the limits of language too. Remember, it's not false, it could possibly be false. That's what Popper and his group were working on.
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