 The verificationist theory of meaning was popularised by A.J. Ayer in his 1936 Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer argues that religious statements—his term for indicative sentences—are “literally meaningless”. According to Ayer, a statement is factually contentful if and only if it is empirically verifiable. A statement is empirically verifiable if what it says can in principle be shown to be true or false by observation. Although logically necessary statements are not verifiable, according to Ayer they are analytic or true by virtue of the meaning of their constituent terms. As such, “none of them provide any information about any matter of fact” (1936: 79). Ayer encapsulated the verificationist theory of meaning with the infamous empirical verification principle: to have literal meaning a statement must be either analytically true (and thereby factually uninformative) or empirically verifiable.