Ed Murphy wrote:
> a) An attempted speech act is equivalent to a claim that the
> person will perform the action by sending the message.
I think this muddies things. You're relying on the common understanding
of "attempted speech act", but that's an emergent concept some way removed
from the relevant rules. Meanwhile you're trying to establish a very
basic aspect of the interpretation of statements. It's an abstraction
inversion. How about:
A statement that the speaker is performing an action by means
of a public message can be true or false as for any other kind
of statement, and in particular it is false if the speaker does
not thereby successfully perform the action described.
-zefram
