ABSTRACT
Two features of Austin's schemes are worthy of note here. The first is convention(ality). As Jonathan Culler points out, Austin claims that 'what makes an utterance a command or a promise is not the speaker's state of mind at the moment of utterance but conventional rules involving features of the context'. The second feature worthy of note is Austin's recourse to context in his search for firm ground. Both Searle and Derrida treat language as a place of philosophical investigation. Searle allies himself to the tradition of analytical philosophy which pursues the thesis that the philosophy of thought is to be accomplished by the philosophy of language, in the sense that it is through the philosophy of language that we can elucidate how our thoughts relate to the world. Derrida, on the other hand, draws no maps of disciplinary boundaries, and confines himself to describing his enterprise as the reading of philosophical texts in a certain way.
