ABSTRACT
Philosophers like Richard Rorty and Arthur Danto see certain traditions in historical terms – Kant (or Frege) and Hegel (or Husserl) are seen respectively as founding fathers. Austin's enquiry reads informally and untechnically: he indulges also in a certain intellectual playfulness, which makes two aspects of How To Do Things With Words somewhat surprising. Searle has in fact replied to Derrida in his review in the New York Review of Books of Culler's On Deconstruction. In his article in Glyph, John Searle attacks Derrida for locating the infinity of meaning in context and declares stoutly: speakers and hearers are the masters of the set of rules we call the rules of language, and these rules are recursive. The generation of French philosophers who precede Derrida had looked to the notion of a 'mixed system' as the source of indeterminacy; Derrida refers instead to the need for context in the determination of the meaning.
