IACSIACSInt'l Academy for Consciousness Studies
School of Language · A course at IACS

Speech Acts and What We Do With Words

Austin, Searle, and the sentence as an action

"I now pronounce you married" doesn't describe a fact, it performs one. J.L. Austin's discovery that language does things, not just says things, and John Searle's later taxonomy of speech acts (assertives, directives, commissives, and the rest), gave philosophy a whole new unit of analysis: not the sentence, but the act the sentence carries out.

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