1. I think the verification theory can be accused of committing the descriptive fallacy because it relies on the utterance actually being able to be verified through empirical observation. Unfortunately, not all things can be verified, or at least verified through empirical observation because some things simply cannot be verified as of right now, such as the existence of various religious gods and entities, and other things cannot be verified through empirical evidence, such as some mathematical proofs. However, the goal of the verification theory is to try and assign truth values to things despite these issues, and thus can be accused to committing the descriptive fallacy.
2. Performative utterances avoid committing this fallacy because they do not "report facts" and are thus not true or false, even though they can imply true or false things and must be uttered in the appropriate circumstances to carry meaning. Austin relies on the claim that implying something is true different from "saying something" that is true, and he also relies on the context surrounding the utterance rendering the truth value irrelevant. Austin's focus on this class of utterances allows him to break down the truth value barrier between statements and his classification of performative utterances in order to claim that speech acts like statements and utterances carry a force and that this force allows us to get meaning out of things that would be otherwise not make much sense, like a sign reading 'Bull'.
3. I was a little confused by his intro about the two stages that questioned the descriptive fallacy and nonsense. I didn't catch why that was relevant to his paper, besides outlining some view that preceded him.
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