The verification theory of meaning could be seen as committing the descriptive fallacy in that it literally places meaning on the truth or falsity of a statement. since meaning is the most important thing to know about a statement, then the verification theory is placing the most importance on the validity of the statement, which is committing the descriptive fallacy.
Austin's performative utterances avoid the descriptive fallacy in that these statements are not about truth or falsity, but about performing an action through speech and thus can't be true or false strictly speaking. This focus shows that language is capable of more than just describing the world around us, but also allows us to perform certain actions that wouldn't be possible (or at least extremely difficult) without language.
I wonder to what effect descriptive statements can actually behave like performantive sentences like Austin suggests towards the end of the paper. I feel like to some extent, these sentences still rely the most on their validity before they can be used like Austin suggests.
Yeah, I agree with you in that it's tough to say how far you can push Austin's distinction of performative sentences onto descriptive statements. Certainly, as Strawson pointed, sentences like 'the king of France is bald' relies a great deal on context to determine its truth value, so in some sense utterances themselves are not or cannot really be thought of as true or false apart from their context. Even statements like the 'the bar is closed' can be thought to have a perfomative element to it that it performs an action, i.e. closing the bar, while also describing a state of affairs, said bar is closed.
ReplyDeleteAndre, I also wonder about the performance of descriptive statements. It seems that the act of describing something is functional to fixing the reference for a discussion or observation; or, taking cues from Imogen Dickie, updating the "descriptive core" relevant to the object. If you have any other insights, I would be interested to discuss it further.
ReplyDelete