The Descriptive Fallacy

For Austin, a mistaken vision of language that he attributes to the dominant philosophical trends of his day, particularly logical positivism, in which language is seen primarily as a means of describing the world, and sentences are accordingly seen primarily as statements. This logic made the philosophers task one of evaluating the truth or falsity of those statements its primary task, priveledging a perspective that elided the complex interrelationship of language and reality.