True/false Value and John Searle
John R. Searle argued in his 1989 article How Performatives Work that performatives are true/false just like constatives. Searle further claimed that performatives are what he calls declarations; this is a technical notion of Searle's account: according to his conception, an utterance is a declaration, if "the successful performance of the speech act is sufficient to bring about the fit between words and world, to make the propositional content true." Searle believes that this double direction of fit contrasts the simple word-to-world fit of assertives.
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Famous quotes containing the words true and/or false:
“I was not long since in a company where I wot not who of my fraternity brought news of a kind of pills, by true account, composed of a hundred and odd several ingredients; whereat we laughed very heartily, and made ourselves good sport; for what rock so hard were able to resist the shock or withstand the force of so thick and numerous a battery?”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“I am well acquainted with your manner of wrenching the true
cause the false way.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)