ABSTRACT
Jonathan Cohen has raised a nasty problem about the truth conditions of sentences that contain explicit performative prefaces that specify the type of speech act to be performed. J. L. Austin introduced a third feature of utterances, in addition to illocutionary force and locutionary content: perlocutionary effect. The verification and truth-condition theories of meaning identify a sentence's meaning with the sentence's propositional or locutionary content alone. Searle divides speech-act rules into constitutive rules and regulative rules. William Alston tried seriously to work Austin's speech-act pragmatics into a theory of locutionary meaning itself, identifying a sentence's meaning with the sentence's "illocutionary act-potential," the range of illocutionary acts the sentence could be used to perform. But in fact Alston's view did nothing to illuminate locutionary meaning, since potential-speech-act descriptions such as "assert that gorillas are vegetarians" already presuppose a notion of propositional content and exploit the meanings of their complement clauses.
