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When Failure is Success: Counter-Performative Speech Acts 
Andrew P. Porter 
internet email: porter@s1.gov
1993
 
 
 
 
Introduction 
 
1
John L. Austin[1] saw that where assertive 
speech acts (to use Searle's term) are true or 
false, other performatives can be happy and 
successful, or they can be infelicitous, 
defective, or even outright failures. In Searle's 
systematization of speech act theory[2] the 
emphasis was always on articulating the 
conditions for non-defective success. 
Self-defeating speech acts were explored 
initially by Daniel Vanderveken,[3] but nothing 
was remarked beyond the logical structure of 
their failure as illocutions. It was not suspected 
that they could be effective and successful as 
perlocutions. To turn to such speech acts as 
successes is to turn from illocutionary theory 
to the study of perlocutions, but the 
perlocutions in question turn on their 
illocutionary structure, and so require attention 
to that structure. Such speech acts need not be 
vicious; irony is in some sense a self-defeating 
speech act.[4] When they are objectionable, 
remedying them usually requires dissecting 
their illocutionary incoherence; this is a 
problem, because the inconsistency of the parts 
of a compound and self-defeating speech act is 
usually concealed. (It must be concealed, if the 
illocutionarily self-defeating speech act is to 
succeed as a non-ironic perlocution.) Let us 
call self-defeating performative speech acts 
that work at some level as perlocutions 
{counter}-performative speech acts. When the 
counter-performative character of a speech act 
is obvious, it is ironic; when it is not, the 
speech act is usually pathological in some way. 
I look for the most part at speech acts with 
concealed counter-performative character. 
 
2
The investigation of speech acts other 
than assertions has moved from the simple 
paradigmatic cases of promises and orders etc. 
to indirect speech acts, metaphor, fiction, and 
eventually to internally inconsistent speech 
acts. In the course of that exploration some 
quite peculiar peformatives have surfaced. It 
has been noticed that some performatives are 
analogous to self-contradictory statements,[5] 
such as "Do (not) obey this order," "I promise 
(not) to keep this promise," and others of 
similar construction. It does not matter 
whether the negative is present or not; these 
performatives are intrinsically infelicious, 
misfires. There is no way to keep this 
self-referring promise, or to obey this 
self-referring order. In a more applicable vein, 
Daniel Vanderveken has noticed what he 
called "self-defeating" speech acts. 
 
3
To see how some counter-performatives 
work, consider the following. In a legendary 
example of a counter-performative, it is said 
that one of the Three Great Lies is 
 
	I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you. 
 
This purports to be more than a statement, an 
offer of help, though it is incidentally also a 
statement. It is taken as a classic example of a 
lie, but the problem does not arise with its 
being contra-factual. S, the speaker, is in fact 
from the government. And he intends business 
in the life and affairs of H, the hearer. But not 
what the hearer would call "help." 
 
4
It is performative, in as much as the 
social worker does something in saying it (by 
implication, he offers help), and it goes awry 
in ways that are characteristic of performatives 
that are not just assertions. This much has been 
noticed before, though this sort of utterance 
has not attracted much attention, but has been 
taken as a theoretically marginal and 
degenerate instance of performative language. 
Performatives that work were treated as more 
interesting than those that don't. 
 
5
In fact, it {does} work: It does {exactl}y what 
it is intended to do, which is to apply 
persuasion to the welfare client in a way that is 
more economical and more effective than 
candid reasoning, orders, or threats: coercion. 
(And if there is no compliance, the one making 
this "offer" appears to be in a much better 
position to apply coercion.) While appearing to 
be an offer, an offer of help, this utterance is in 
fact not an offer at all, but a form of coercion, 
pressure, or manipulation. It is a performative 
that purports to do one thing, but in fact does 
something quite opposite: a 
counter-performative. Its effectiveness, its 
performative force, {requires} its 
counter-performative sense; its perlocutionary 
effect of being coercive pivots on its 
illocutionary appearance of being an offer of 
help, and on the silent failure of at least some 
of the conditions for the non-defective 
performance of such an offer. 
 
 
Preliminary Expansion of the Thesis 
 
6
The notion of utterances that are 
systematically and intentionally 
counter-performative (if perhaps not 
consciously so) has not attracted focused 
attention. But the problem has already been 
encountered outside of speech act theory. 
Popular psychological literature focuses, if 
without philosophical precision, on the 
counter-performative discourse that creates 
dysfunctional family structures. In a related 
way, the philosophical literature on 
self-deception does achieve precision, though 
without explicit attention to the speech-act 
theoretical features of such discourse. 
Examples can be found also from law, politics, 
and religious apologetics. 
 
7
While counter-performatives are not 
theoretically central to the logic of {il}locutions, 
they are crucial to the pragmatic understanding 
of the same utterances when considered as 
{per}locutionary acts. Formal performatives, 
whose illocutionary sense cannot be twisted 
after the fact, are a defense against 
counter-performatives. Formal performatives 
commit the speaker in one way or another, 
whether sincere or not, and sometimes even 
without happy preparatory conditions. It is 
because of the generally understood possibility 
of counter-performatives that formal 
performatives are necessary at critical 
commissive junctures in life. 
 
8
The speaker who engages in 
counter-performative discourse knows how 
this sort of speech act works, even though he 
may not be willing or able to spell it out or 
explain it.[6] He has the skill of 
counter-performative speech acts, included in 
which is the opposition between the ostensible 
illocutionary force and the probable (and 
intended) perlocutionary effect. All this may 
be "unconscious" -- he does not spell it out to 
himself -- but it is still done with great skill, 
and so has to be accounted as intentional, 
responsible. In no way does the skill of 
counter-performative speaking require being 
able to {explain} (even to oneself) that one has 
misfired in one performative act, and has 
instead effectively performed some other 
speech act. It is not that the illocutionary force 
has been literally transformed. But when the 
speech-act turns on its implications, by way of 
filling the preparatory conditions for yet other 
speech acts, its perlocutionary working may 
indeed not only extend beyond but in fact be in 
conflict with its illocutionary force. Indirect 
speech acts, as Searle has observed, are 
accomplished when the conditions for one 
speech act are supplied in the performance of 
another.[7] If a statement or question provides 
the preparatory conditions for a request or 
other directive, it may be taken as such. The 
essential condition for a stronger directive is 
satisfied, and by convention, the question "Can 
you pass the salt?" counts as a request to do so. 
Thus an apparently simple speech act may, in 
its implications, count for much more. 
 
9
Searle and Vanderveken list a variety of 
ways in which a compound speech act can 
become internally inconsistent, self-defeating. 
The success of one member of the compound 
may be inconsistent with the illocutionary 
{point} of the other.[8] One member of a 
compound may be inconsistent with the {mode} 
of achievement of the other: one cannot 
simultaneously command and plead with 
another to do something. And one member of 
the compound may be inconsistent with the 
{propositional content} of the other, or the 
{presupposed (preparatory) conditions} of the 
other, or with the {psychological state} required 
by the other. We shall see general 
circumstances in which each of these modes of 
counter-performative speech can be highly 
effective. 
 
10
It is true that self-defeating speech acts 
are such by virtue of inconsistency, but the 
inconsistency can arise in various ways, which 
may be noted at this point, and which will 
appear in the discussion that follows. The 
model for a counterperformative is a 
compound speech act in which the several 
members are inconsistent. In one way or 
another, I think all counter-performatives can 
be rephrased as compounds. A speech act may 
not be an explicit compound; crucial parts may 
be only implied, or enacted only by 
indirection. In addition to patently compound 
illocutionary acts, simple acts may be 
counter-performative in the failure of a 
condition; that condition presumably can be 
spelled out, thus supplying the missing 
element of what would then be a compound 
speech act. The implied additional speech acts 
may arise from features internal to the uttered 
speech acts, or they may arise only given the 
context known to both speaker and hearer. 
Complex speech acts are possible in which 
multiple speakers participate, and the 
cumulative implications are 
counter-performative, because one speaker 
appears to presuppose agreement with what the 
other has said. When all the implied but 
unstated members of a speech act are spelled 
out, most simple failures and multi-speaker 
acts can be understood as compound speech 
acts whose several parts are inconsistent.[9] 
 
11
In what follows, I shall consider three 
major examples of counter-performative 
speech acts; the one with which we began 
(inconsistent illocutionary points), one of the 
form "do A & don't do A" (inconsistent 
propositional content), and lastly one that 
arises in a complex interchange between a 
telephone salesman and his prospective 
customer. The critical importance of context 
will emerge: it is necessary to supply context 
simply in order to make it plausible that people 
could say things such as these, and especially 
in order to show how such 
counter-performatives could be effective; in 
each case, in ways concealed from at least one 
conversant. In reliance on context in 
demonstrating the perlocutionary workings of 
such speech acts, we are on the threshold of 
pragmatics. The first two speech-act examples 
will instantiate some of Searle and 
Vanderveken's catalog of self-defeating 
speech acts; the conversation with the 
telephone salesman is less clear, though I will 
hazard some taxonomic guesses for it. At this 
point, rather than search for more examples to 
complete a bestiary of counter-performatives, 
it is more useful to return to Searle and 
Vanderveken's own catalog, and draw some 
elementary inferences from it by way of 
general recommendation for what to look for 
in ferreting out counter-performatives in the 
wild. 
 
 
Inconsistent Illocutionary Points 
 
12
Now it is possible to re-examine the 
example with which we began, "I'm from the 
government and I'm here to help you." Both 
the social worker and speaker, S, and the 
welfare client and hearer, H, know that H is in 
trouble, that H has no bargaining power, the 
appearance of no reasonable options, except, 
that is, to accept the "help" that S offers. It is 
background information that is played upon in 
the counter-performative, and it characterizes 
one act as another: what it calls help is 
meddling, interference, directing the life of H, 
forcing H to comply with the requirements of 
the Welfare Department, imposing S's 
hierarchy of ends and order of means on H. It 
is persuasive because the social worker is here 
to take charge; that is the way welfare works. 
This persuasion is effectively coercive, 
because of the limited options of the 
prospective welfare client. As such, it is 
directive. In effect, the inconsistency can be 
exhibited quite simply: "I'm from the 
government [the preparatory condition for a 
directive, reminding the hearer of the 
government's intrinsic power to coerce], and 
I'm here to help you [a commissive whose 
illocutionary force is inconsistent with 
coercion]." A social worker once admitted the 
truth, when dealing with elderly clients, for 
whom "help" means total loss of independence 
in a nursing home: "I can't tell you the 
countless numbers of people we've had to, 
well, brainwash to get them to accept services. 
They always think it's a step toward nursing 
homes."[10] In choosing the word "brainwash", 
the social worker has come as close as it is 
possible to do without using the technical 
language of speech-act theory to admitting that 
his speech is counter-performative. 
 
13
Human life in any context is to a great 
extent a matter of commissives and directives, 
especially the latter. Institutional structures and 
power relations are largely a matter of 
directives. It seems to be a feature of 
present-day rhetorical life that the most 
effective way to accomplish a directive, and to 
elicit compliance, is to disguise it as an offer of 
help: a distinctly different sort of speech act. In 
this sense, the familiar "Can I help you?" does 
not mean what it says, but rather, "You are on 
my turf, I will lead you through it, you will do 
as I say." This locution has migrated from the 
script in which the speaker is a salesperson, 
nominally at the service of the hearer, a 
prospective customer, to any situation that can 
be characterized as an encounter between an 
insider and an outsider. The illocution "Can I 
help you?" by presupposition asserts a claim of 
power and dominance, and asserts the relations 
of insider and outsider; quite the opposite of its 
ostensible meaning of service and 
subservience. 
 
 
Inconsistent propositional content: "Do A & Don't do A" 
 
14
It is difficult to believe that one could 
utter a performative of the form "I command 
you to do A and I forbid you to do A" to any 
useful perlocutionary end. But the only thing 
standing in the way of the usefulness of such a 
counter-performative is its transparently 
obvious character. Searle and Vanderveken 
argue that "... a speaker cannot perform an act 
of illocutionary denegation of the form 
<not>-A at a time when he performs an act 
that commits him to A."[11] But it is only true 
that the speaker cannot consistently {il}locute an 
utterance of this form; the same utterance, 
considered in its {per}locutionary aspect may 
depend precisely on its illocutionary failure. A 
speaker may find it advantageous to appear to 
commit himself to A, when his real 
commitment is to <not>-A; it is possible to 
craft utterances which do just this. I have heard 
in public debate the following: 
 
	(a) I respect the religious views of those 
		who disagree with ballot initiative X, 
	(b) and they should vote against the initiative; 
	(c) at the same time, I request that they 
		not impose their morality upon others. 
 
I have tagged the three parts of this 
performative (a), (b), and (c). In context, it was 
implied that to vote against the initiative was 
exactly to impose one's morality on others; 
The initiative was put on the ballot to promote 
a practice that some had moral objections to. 
Why does this counter-performative work so 
well? (b) is consistent easily enough with (a); 
but (b) is radically incompatible with (c). If (c) 
is accepted as sincere, (a) cannot be. Respect 
for another's commitments involves admitting 
those commitments to deliberation and debate; 
(c) is precisely an attempt to rule those others' 
commitments out of order. (b) implies a 
directive, "vote against the initiative". In this 
implication, the conjunction (b)&(c) is 
precisely of the form "do A & don't do A." My 
conjecture as to how this performative works 
is that (a) allows those potentially in 
agreement with the initiative X but not yet 
firmly convinced to see themselves as not in 
the sort of disagreement that actually requires 
a difficult decision. Instead, they are offered a 
compromise that ought to satisfy both parties, 
by offering to their opponents all that their 
opponents could reasonably ask for (which by 
implication does not include allowing their 
opponents to vote their consciences). Such 
potential supporters of the initiative could then 
in easy conscience vote for what the speaker 
hoped they really wanted all along anyway. 
When this sort of counter-performative occurs, 
(b) is usually ommitted, in as much as it tends 
to give the game away. 
 
15
This utterance can have different 
strategies for its two classes of hearers. It is 
probable that while the apparent intended 
hearers (i. e., those to whom it was addressed) 
were those opposed to the initiative (they were 
requested not to impose their views on others), 
the real intended hearers were those potentially 
in favor of it (the context was a public debate), 
and they were implicitly encouraged to 
conclude that they could give all they owed to 
their opponents and still vote for the initiative. 
 
16
A more bald example is provided in 
legends of the city politics of Cambridge, 
Massachusetts, where the dividing issue is 
rents, and the parties landlords and tenants. 
Occasionally a politician tries to promise to 
lower rents for tenants and raise rents for 
landlords. It is reported that this platform 
meets more success than one might expect in a 
city of such sophistication. A 
counter-performative of the form "do A and 
don't do A" can be quite effective if the 
speaker faces conflicting demands from 
different constituencies; if he can appear to 
satisfy one, or at least neutralize its opposition, 
he can later gratify the other. 
 
17
Applications of this form are hardly 
limited to politics, but politics and even court 
decisions seem to be particularly rich in them. 
Antonin Scalia, in a dissent in Johnson v. 
Transportation Agency, alleges that the Civil 
Rights Act of 1964 has been converted by 
court decisions "from a guarantee that race or 
sex will {not} be the basis for employment 
determinations, to a guarantee that it often 
{will}."[12] Merits of the case and of the opinion 
aside, this is a clear charge of a 
counterperformative interpretation of the law. 
That the law was even susceptible of such an 
interpretation raises the question whether not 
only the Court's opinion but also the statute 
itself is counterperformative. It has been 
informally observed that canny legislators, 
who know that the final determination of the 
meaning of a law will come only in the courts, 
from friendly and activist judicial review, 
insert contradictory material into the 
legislative history of a bill, planting grounds 
for judges to rewrite or even reverse the sense 
of the act as passed. In another example, 
Congressional appropriations for the Tellico 
Dam (which would have destroyed the habitat 
of the snail darter on the Little Tennessee 
River) continued while Congress deliberated 
on and passed the Endangered Species Act; the 
resulting counter-performative implications of 
the several acts taken together had to be 
resolved in court.[13] 
 
18
Are there other reasons why a speaker 
could issue a performative that is implicitly 
and covertly of the form "do A and don't do 
A"? It relieves him of responsibility, no matter 
what the hearer does. Which member of the 
counter-performative conjunction is concealed 
will be chosen so as to maximally conceal the 
speaker's responsibility. If A is dangerous, and 
S does not want responsibility for harm to H, it 
is easy to imagine a plausible context for such 
a counter-performative. 
 
19
Related to this is "I {dare} you to do A." It 
appears to be a directive, coupled with a 
disavowal of the responsibility that goes with a 
directive. This is, at a minimum, a somewhat 
peculiar illocutionary force. But how can a 
directive be issued without committing the 
speaker to some responsibility for his 
injunction to the hearer? It seems unlikely to 
me that a single word could in its own intrinsic 
explicit illocutionary sense be a 
counter-performative, but this verb raises such 
a suspicion. Certainly the prudent hearer is 
well-advised to treat it as a 
counter-performative. 
 
 
Invitations to commit a counter-performative 
 
20
In a common multi-speaker 
counter-performative, it is a grave strategic 
mistake to give a telephone salesman reasons 
for declining his offer. Who has not had a 
telephone salesman call, offering "Eight weeks 
of the {Tri-Valley Gossip} free, you pay only for 
the Sunday edition . . . "? After declining the 
offer, the recipient will next hear, "{Why} don't 
you want our bargain trial subscription offer?" 
It is a fatal mistake to give reasons at this point 
-- because the respondent (who received the 
call) and the speaker (the salesman) will treat 
the reasons quite differently. The salesman can 
always treat reasons as an offer to bargain, and 
reply with counter-reasons, and 
counter-demands for more reasons. But the 
respondent presumably has no intention of 
bargaining; he (or she) just doesn't want the 
paper, but he also wants to be polite. (Note the 
performative intentions!) But to give reasons at 
all is to presuppose that under some 
conditions, the recipient of the call would 
subscribe. When the recipient has initially 
declined the offer, the salesman's move in 
asking for reasons is to get the recipient of the 
call to concede exactly this presupposition. In 
effect, he has asked the recipient to treat his 
own refusal not as the starting point of a chain 
of practical reasoning, but as its end point. Out 
of politeness, the recipient usually obliges. But 
from the new starting point implicit in 
whatever reasons the recipient gives, the 
salesman can twist reasons to his own desired 
end point, a sale. In the end, if the recipient 
really doesn't want to subscribe, he has to say 
so, without giving reasons. The direct 
approach is so rarely taken with telephone 
salesmen that it tends to produce stunning 
results: "I'm sorry, I don't give reasons." 
 
21
The salesman is inviting the recipient of 
the call to commit a counter-performative: that 
is, in giving reasons, to offer to bargain, when 
the recipient has no intention of bargaining at 
all. The logical form of such a request is, 
"please justify your starting point." This is to 
construe an argument {from} X as an argument 
{to} X. By definition, it is not possible to justify 
a starting point. Consider, for example, some 
of the commitments inherent in doing science: 
openness to criticism, empirical encounter with 
the world as it is (rather than with some 
platonic ideal world), science open to all and 
for all. These are not things that could be 
justified; least of all justified from the fruits 
they bring. Yet one could answer the question 
"Why these commitments?" by citing their 
fruits. Another could then interpret such an 
answer as an argument of expediency {from} the 
benefits of science, rather than as the 
confession of one whose commitment to 
science is axiomatic, and to whom these other 
benefits have been given in addition. But an 
argument of expediency can be modified or 
suspended at convenience. (It would have been 
better not to answer the question at all.) 
 
22
To guess the structure of the 
self-defeating speech acts in this sort of a 
conversation, the problem appears to lie in the 
illocutionary force of the reasons given by the 
respondent to the salesman. The salesman is 
asking the respondent to make a commissive 
whose force is ambiguous, and so can be 
twisted: a confessional commissive has a force 
crucially different from that of an offer to 
bargain. My suspicion is that confessional 
speech acts (as in confessions of faith), have 
features which, despite all the attention they 
have attracted, still leave room for significant 
work. 
 
23
At this point, we have seen clear 
examples of two sorts of illocutionarily 
self-defeating speech acts which are 
nevertheless quite effective as perlocutions, so 
long as their working can be concealed. The 
welfare worker engages in the appearance of 
making an offer, a commissive, while 
effectively issuing a coercive directive; in this 
context, the two illocutionary points are 
incompatible. (It {is} possible to combine a 
commisive and a directive in compatible 
ways.) The politician can find it rhetorically 
very effective to appear to come down on both 
sides of an issue (inconsistent propositional 
contents). The problems in the encounter with 
the telephone salesman arise in the subtleties 
of the illocutionary strength of the speech-act 
of giving reasons. Rather than exhibit 
examples of the remaining ways in which the 
illocutionary forces of members of compound 
speech acts can be inconsistent on analytic 
grounds, grounds of the {form} of the speech 
acts, it seems more economical simply to note 
the remaining possibilities for trouble, in as 
much as the problems which do arise usually 
do so only with respect to context; that is, they 
are not evident simply on the form of the 
speech acts, but the pathology shows itself 
only after knowledge of the pragmatic context. 
 
24
The mode of achievement may be at 
stake in conflicted ways when an assertive 
takes on the color of a directive, and the 
role-authority of the one speaking is in 
question. Such problems arise in the 
psychological literature, especially as it treats 
dysfunctional family systems. 
 
25
Speech acts presuppose a psychological 
state on the part of the speaker, and this too 
can be the locus of inconsistency. Searle's own 
definition is a most economical example: 
 
	"Finally, an illocutionary act whose preparatory 
	conditions cannot be presupposed 
	simultaneously with the expression of the sincerity 
	conditions of another illocutionary act is also 
	relatively incompatible with that other illocutionary act. 
	For example, a speaker cannot both recommend that the 
	hearer carry out a certain course of action and 
	simultaneously complain under the same aspects that he will 
	carry it out because one cannot consistently both 
	presuppose that a course of action is good and express 
	dissatisfaction about it under the same aspects 
	and for the same reasons."[14] 
 
But people do this all the time! As an 
illocution, such a speech acts are inconsistent, 
but as a perlocution, they can be surprisingly 
effective. The challenge is in dissecting from 
the conversation the ends to which it is 
effective. That virtually always depends on 
context, and it usually also turns on 
interpreting "under the same aspects" in 
apparently analogous but in fact conflicting 
senses. 
 
26
By far the richest occasion for 
counter-performatives lies in the required 
presuppositions for speech acts. One can assert 
a description by presupposition, and so conceal 
the assertion. And one can insinuate, by 
presupposition, that the world is such that it 
can be {treated} as it is in the ensuing speech 
acts. Analogies may be distorted, one party 
may co-opt the position of another, 
maintaining the other's speech acts, but to 
quite opposed ends, and one party may put out 
a "conceptual Trojan Horse," which the other 
party accepts at its own risk. Obviously, these 
tend to be multi-speaker speech acts of 
considerable complexity, in addition to being 
intricately context-dependent. 
 
27
Non-philosophers have had to deal 
informally with counter-performatives for 
some time, as the psychological literature and 
oral tradition in politics and law can amply 
testify. And philosophers other than speech act 
theorists have recognized the problem: 
 
	Instead of aiming directly at propositions 
	believed or practices performed in order 
	to challenge their truth or value, suspicion 
	is aimed at the individual or community 
	who believes and performs in order to challenge 
	their integrity. It looks for that 
	discrepancy between professed meaning and 
	actual use which renders life ironical; 
	for it is the essence of the ironical (speech) 
	act that it performs a function quite at 
	odds with its surface meaning. Thus an ironical 
	compliment functions to express a 
	criticism. For this reason suspicion is less 
	interested in the official meaning of 
	beliefs and practices than in their operative 
	meaning, the clue to which is the 
	life-world from which they arise and which, 
	in turn, they legitimize.[15] 
 
Searle's and Westphal's philosophical 
outlooks are worlds apart -- showing that 
Searle and Vanderveken's typology of 
illocutionarily self-defeating speech acts is a 
useful and precise analytic tool in dissecting 
perlocutionarily counter-performative speech 
acts far beyond its original philosophical 
home. It is surprising that Vanderveken's 
original insight has not found more use. 
 
 
Notes
 
 
[1] {How To Do Things With Words} 2nd ed., 
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1975). 
 
 
[2] {Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy 
of Language} (London: Cambridge Univ. 
Pr., 1969); {Expression and Meaning} 
(Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979); 
Terrence Tilley's {The Evils of Theodicy}
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1991)
was my guide to some of this literature,
and Tilley has been helpful in private correspondence.  
 
 
[3] "Illocutionary Logic and Self-Defeating 
Speech Acts," in John R. Searle, Ferenc 
Kiefer and Manfred Bierwisch, eds., 
{Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics}, 
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980), and John 
R. Searle and Daniel Vanderveken, 
{Foundations of Illocutionary Logic} 
(Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 
148 ff. 
 
 
[4] When Searle analysed irony, in "Metaphor" 
(in {Expression and Meaning}, esp. pp. 
112-116), he defined it from the hearer's 
knowledge in context that the speech act 
is to be interpreted in a sense {opposite} 
to its ostensible meaning. 
 
 
[5] George Lakoff, "Performative Antinomies," 
{Foundations of Language} 8 (1972) 569. 
 
 
[6] Herbert Fingarette explores the paradoxes 
of having an "unconscious" policy of not 
spelling out an engagement with life in 
{Self Deception} (London: RKP, 1969). 
 
 
[7] "Indirect Speech Acts," in 
{Expression and Meaning} (Cambridge University 
Press, 1979). 
 
 
[8] This and following types of pathology are 
from Searle and Vanderveken, pp. 148-152. 
 
 
[9] Contextual implications may be further 
complicated by the fact that one or both of 
the speaker and hearer are able to deal 
practically with the context in life (though 
maybe not happily so), but are unable to 
spell out all of its revelant features. 
 
 
[10] {Wall Street Journal} cxxvii, #110 
(1992/12/03), p. 1. 
 
 
[11] Searle and Vanderveken, p. 153. 
 
 
[12] 480 US 616, at p. 658. 
 
 
[13] See TVA v. Hill, 437 US 153; the chronology 
of events can be found at pp. 153 and 
197. I am indebted to Phillip E. Johnson 
for notice of these cases. 
 
 
[14] Searle and Vanderveken, p. 150. 
 
 
[15] Merold Westphal, "Phenomenologies and 
Religious Truth," in {Phenomenology of 
the Truth Proper to Religion}, ed. Daniel 
Guerriere, Albany, SUNY Press, 1990; 
p. 120.