Epilogue to the Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts

I wrote the paper reprinted here as Searle, 1975) has since been reprinted on a number of occasions, ¹ and the ideas in the taxonomy later formed the basis of a formal logic of speech acts that I wrote with Daniel Vanderveken (1985). Looking it over, after a period of nearly two decades, I believe that the piece has stood the test of time remarkably well. In this epilogue, I want to try to explain how the taxonomy works and what general philosophical issues are at stake.