Abstract

Concerned with the question of whether descriptions of identity, i.e. describing X as Y, amount to the same as statements of identity, i.e. stating that X equals Y. Austin characteristically tackles this question by investigating into the nature of a number of relevant speech acts, such as ‘calling’, ‘describing’, and ‘stating’. He concludes negatively that none of the speech acts discussed can be safely used in philosophy in a general way. However, the construction of models of speech situations reveals their underlying complexity: such models are plainly too complicated to accommodate the standard subject-predicate or class-membership models that a straightforward answer to the question raised in this paper would depend on.