Descriptive fallacy: Difference between revisions

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Austin's label of 'descriptive fallacy' was aimed primarily at [[logical positivism]], and his speech act theory was largely a response to logical positivism's view that only statements that are logically or empirically [[verification principle|verifiable]] have cognitive meaning.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |url=http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/edinburghilpl/speech_act_theory/0 |encyclopedia=Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language |title=Speech Act Theory |editor-first=Siobhan |editor-last=Chapman |editor2-first=Christopher |editor2-last=Routledge|year=2009 |isbn=9781849724517}}</ref> Logical positivism aimed to approach philosophy on the model of empirical science, seeking to express philosophical statements in ways to render them verifiable by empirical means. Statements that cannot be verified as either true or false are seen as meaningless. This would exclude many statements about religion, metaphysics, aesthetics, or ethics as meaningless and philosophically uninteresting, making merely emotive or evocative claims expressing one's feelings rather than making verifiable claims about reality.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |encyclopedia=The Oxford Companion to Philosophy |title=Logical Positivism |editor-first=Ted |editor-last=Honderich |year=2005 |isbn=9780199264797}}</ref>

Austin disagreed with the positivistpositivists's contention that the only philosophically significant use of language is to describe reality by stating facts, pointing out that speakers do much more with language than merely describe reality. For example, asking questions, making requests or issuing orders, offering invitations, making promises, and many other common statements are not descriptive. Rather, they are performative: in making such statements, speakers ''do'' things rather than describe things.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Chapman|first1=Siobhan|title=Philosophy for Linguists: An Introduction|url=https://archive.org/details/philosophyforlin00chap|url-access=limited|date=2000|publisher=Routledge|___location=New York|isbn=9780415206594|pages=[https://archive.org/details/philosophyforlin00chap/page/n118 106]-143}}</ref>

Based on this distinction of what Austin labeled as 'constative' utterances (statements that describe, which were the focus of logical positivism) and 'performative' utterances (statements that perform or do something), Austin developed his speech act theory to investigate how we do things with words.<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |url=http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/cupelanscis/performative_and_constative/0?searchId=7fe30f28-3ad5-11e5-80a2-0aea1e24c1ac&result=0 |encyclopedia=The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences |title=Performative and Constative |editor-first=Patrick |editor-last=Hogan |year=2011 |isbn=9781139144711}}</ref>

==References==