Logical Studies

Strawson and The Performative Theory of Truth

Document Type : Research

Author

Gholamreza Hosseinpour

Assistant Professor of Research Institute of Imam Khomeini and Islamic Revolution

https://doi.org/10.30465/lsj.2021.36481.1364
Abstract
In his article "Truth", Peter Strawson, following Ramsey, raises the issue of the redundancy of the theory of truth. He considers the utterance of sentences containing the truth predicate to do something, and in his idiomatic sense, he does not consider it constative, but performative. Performative utterances are not true or false, but are characterized by felicitous or infelicitous, and are actions or deeds, not propositions or descriptions. Thus, in this article, after mentioning Strawson's critiques of the theory of truth and explaining his performative theory of truth and explaining Austin's performative utterances, we will deal with the three critiques of Strawson's conception and then examining the relationship between linguistic meaning and the performative theory of truth and explaining systematical of meaning, we prove that not just Strawson's performative theory of truth is incorrect, but that the conception of performative uses of language can also be defective. In this sense, the ordinary language philosophers also exaggerated the extent to which performative sentences are different from ordinary non-performative sentences. These philosophers mistakenly assumed that performative sentences do not represent descriptive and ordinary propositions that provide the sentences with straightforward truth conditions.

Keywords

Strawson
Austin
Theory of truth
performatives utterances
the truth predicate
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Logical Studies
Volume 12, Issue 2
September 2021
Pages 85-107

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