This experimental study is a proof-of-concept of a theory of meaning first put forward by Bar-Hillel and Carnap in 1953 and foreshadowed by Asimov in 1951. The theory is the Popperian-like notion that the meaningfulness of a proposition is its a priori falsity. We tested this theory by translating to logical form a long, tightly written, published text and computed the meaningfulness of each proposition using the a priori falsity measure. We then selected the top propositions – by a priori falsity – and strung them together to form ad hoc abstracts and compared these abstracts with the published summary. The results are startling: Translation to logical form followed by application of the Asimov/Bar-Hillel/Carnap idea produces excellent abstracts, thereby providing a proof-of-concept that merely by knowing the logical form of large text passages, one can produce reasonable abstracts of it—without actually understanding the text. In other words, were the results of this experiment to generalize, that would show that logical form captures much more semantics than has heretofore been considered likely. Far from being merely the syntactical rewrite of text into formal notation commonly supposed, logical form, even without knowing almost anything about the particular predicates, individual constants, or other objects referred to in that form, might capture the core of the meaning in some important sense, still to be fully formalized into a comprehensive theory.