Positivism

Rudolph Carnap, and others, believed that a question that could not  be answered empirically or analytically must be a nonsensical question. The realisation that this condition of meaning was, by it's own account, meaningless, pushed 'positivist' approaches to verification and meaning out of the limelight.

The question whether there is any condition of meaningfulness that could avoid this trap has been explored to some extent. In general, however, the statement M: 'A statement is meaningful if it satisfies criterion X', can only (by its own account) be meaningful if it satisfies criterion X. This can only be unequivocally established if we know what 'X' means in M, and for X to mean anything at all, M must be meaningful. As I've argued in other posts, accounts of  meaning will always run up against open question paradoxes.

However, one positivist insight that should not be lost is this: Although a general closed account of what it is for a statement to be meaningful will always turn out to be wrong or question-begging, systematic scepticism about meaningfulness is also incoherent. A sceptic cannot claim both (a) that a question is meaningful and (b) that no conceivable approach to answering it can succeed.

I think Austin was onto something like this with 'real'. If we want to be epistemological realists, we must have some conception of what this means - and this conception must be relevant in some way to how we arrived at, and might defend, our metaphysics.

A question which cuts itself completely adrift (consequentially speaking) from the rest of our conversation is not part of that conversation. It is OK to ask questions that are hard to answer ('Is there life elsewhere in the galaxy?), or even questions which we think may never be possible to answer. But a question which is couched in such a way that any answer is necessarily going to be inadequate (as philosophically sceptical questions are) must be suspect. Nothing we say can have any consequences for the nature of the answer, and so nothing can be consequent upon the answer.

If I ask 'is there a reality beyond what I can perceive?' in such a way as to systematically block any approach to giving an answer, then the answer can have no consequences.

If it has no consequences, can it have meaning? Can I claim that a statement which commits me to nothing has a meaning?

Since it could have no determinate role in a conversation, I doubt if I could.