1. The verification theory says that a sentence's point is to either be true or false, and the truth value of that sentence will be determined by testing the sentence against data collected through empirical observation. This doesn't really make sense, because as Austin points out in "Performative Utterances", it doesn't seem to be necessary for a sentence to have a truth value at all, yet the sentence examples he uses are clearly interesting, significant, and have meaning to the people involved in those acts.
2. Austin seems to avoid this fallacy by exploring sentences which don't describe the state of the world and are neither true nor false. For example, the "I do" sentence he uses as an example simply states the acceptance of the two involved parties that marriage has occurred, but nothing in the state of the world has changed, and even if the speaker secretly doesn't mean what they say, you can't say that it's false.
3. I think Austin in general overestimates what should fall under this category created, the "performative utterance." It seems to me that some of the examples don't seem to be of the same type as others. To use a quick example: "I name this ship the Generalissimo Stalin" is a weird sentence to describe as a performative utterance compared to examples like "I promise" and "I do". I think this is because the sentence itself describes the act itself as it is happening, and it seems easy to say it is false that whoever said this named the ship.
No comments:
Post a Comment