ABSTRACT
One striking feature of Austin's philosophical perspective is the register in which it locates the truth-bearing function. The British philosopher jettisons the idea of an ideal truth-bearer, such as a 'proposition', and replaces it by a new kind of truth-bearer – one which is meant to be concrete and in some sense 'real': what he calls a 'statement'. A statement is said to be true when the historic state of affairs to which it is correlated by the demonstrative conventions is of a type with which the sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive conventions. Austin's anti-Copernican revolution consists first and foremost in highlighting the irreducibility of the act-view when it comes to truth and falsity. According to the act-view, it might seem there should be as many statements as performances, since the set-up of a definite statement – in particular of its way of referring to the world – seems to be performance-dependent.
