John R. Searle (1969), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 203 pp. — DOI-10.1017/CBO9781139173438
Key takeaways
Filed, not read: no lawful full text was reachable (see the history note). Known here only from the publisher’s page and from what the reading of Krifka (LIT-835) quotes of it:
- Publisher’s description (Cambridge Core): “Written in an outstandingly clear and lively style, this 1969 book provokes its readers to rethink issues they may have regarded as long since settled.” The review it carries from Mind summarises the book’s “main hypothesis” as “speaking a language is engaging in a rule-governed form of behaviour”.
- Contents (Cambridge Core): Part One, A Theory of Speech Acts — 1 Methods and scope; 2 Expressions, meaning and speech acts; 3 The structure of illocutionary acts; 4 Reference as a speech act; 5 Predication. Part Two, Some Applications of the Theory — 6 Three fallacies in contemporary philosophy; 7 Problems of reference; 8 Deriving “ought” from “is”.
- Per Krifka (LIT-835, fn. 8 and §8): the book assigns speech acts the general structure F(p), an illocutionary force applied to a proposition, and calls speech acts the “minimal units of conversation” (Krifka’s quotation, read in Krifka, not in Searle).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-09 at the owner’s request from the manuscript
bibliography of 2026-10-09 (work what-survives-translation), which
considered it and dropped it from the final reference list. See the
curation entry of that day.
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read
and no NOTE is filed.
Neighbours. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (LIT-785), which it systematises, is also filed unread. Searle’s later social ontology is in the record and read: “Social ontology: Some basic principles” (LIT-482) and The Construction of Social Reality (LIT-485), which extend the constitutive rules of chapter 2 (“X counts as Y in C”) to institutions.
What a reading should check. Whether chapter 3’s conditions for promising (propositional content, preparatory, sincerity, essential) are offered as necessary and sufficient, and how the essential condition relates to the “counts as” formula of LIT-485; and whether chapter 2’s F(p) analysis allows two acts with the same p to differ in anything but F, which bears on claims that the proposition does not fix the act.