This is a great distillation of the issue in the logical positivist context. It's kind of a shame to me that verificationism was abandoned so quickly -- I think it's an important concept. Clearly it need refinement: (1) what are levels of verification and what can we say about assertions meeting these different levels? (2) can the analytic/synthetic distinction be better unpacked? (Quine's "Two Dogmas" was supposedly the final word, but Saul Kripke explored more deeply.)