 Gödel’s reference to the impossibility of interpreting empirical laws, or more precisely, instantiations of them—the statements “one wants to assert,”—as statements about sense perceptions, is likely an endorsement of the (then) contemporary critique of phenomenalism. The critique was based on the observation that sense data are so inextricably bound up with the conditions under which they are experienced, that no correspondence between statements about those and the statements “we want to assert” can be given (see Chisholm 1948 for example). More generally Gödel was against verificationism, namely the idea that the meaning of a statement is its mode of verification.