Abstract

This book, a reworking of Les enonces performatifs, is perhaps the most interesting and sustained work in English on speech acts since Searle's influential work of that name published in 1969. Whether it is "a major new contribution to the philosophy of language" is more doubtful. It contains nuanced discussions of many of the writers who have nourished the Austin-Searle tradition over the last twenty years, including a number of French authors. But it suffers from being descended from a thesis; there is too much of ringing changes on the commentators, and it is often difficult to keep a tally of Recanati's own views as he states provisional positions later to be modified. More seriously, a distortion of Austin's notion of performativity is central to the book. There is space only to mention two or three problems here.