Are there indirect speech acts?

My purpose in this paper is to explore a sceptical hypothesis about indirect speech acts. The hypothesis is easily stated: there are no indirect speech acts, at least not of the sort that have been prominent in the literature, for example, questions that are also requests. I say that I wish to explore this hypothesis because I am not entirely sure that it is true. I do however think that it deserves to be taken seriously, and I shall outline the argument for thinking this in what follows. The main reason is that the same methodological presumptions that favour what I regard as the most plausible accounts of indirect speech act over their competitors also favour taking the sceptical hypothesis seriously. ¹ The main evidence in favour of the existence of indirect speech acts, and hence against the sceptical hypothesis, is a well-known set of examples that seem to obviously involve a certain indirectness of communication. It is no part of the sceptical hypothesis to question this point about the indirect conveyance of a message. What I wish to put in doubt is the explanation that the various theories of indirect speech acts provide in terms of the performance of a second illocutionary act. Where I wish to begin, then, is with a brief survey of the sorts of examples in question, with as few presumptions about what the proper treatment of these examples is as possible.