As always, if some further topic of your own appeals more, just discuss it with me in advance.

    1.  Weigh in on the "CE" issue.

    2.  Discuss any further issue raised by Carston.

    3.  Meditate upon the concept of lying.  What does and what does not count as a lie?  We've raised a number of questions about this along the way:  The Sartre question; the Clinton question(s); the Oprah and Flashman questions.  Carston's "CE" thesis raises a further one, because if a cancellable or quasi-cancellable explicature counts as said, then one who deliberately perpetrates a false one has lied.  Address such questions.

    4.  Point out some difficulties for Austin's distinction between locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts.  Examine some troublesome borderline cases.

    5.  State and evaluate Cohen's objection (pp. 181-84 of my textbook if you want to see it in print) in more detail than we did in class.

    6.  In his famous monograph "General Semantics," David Lewis defends the antiAustinian idea that when one tokens (even) a "pure" performative, one at the same time states that one is performing the act in question  or at least, the sentence one utters is true iff one is performing that act.  Examine this view.

    7.  Austin's examples on pp. 577-8 of our selection from How to Do Things with Words are designed (?) to impugn the traditional assumption that every declarative statement is either true or false.  What exactly does he take himself to have shown?  Has he done so successfully?  Has he unwittingly shown anything else?  What do you take to be the lesson(s) of those examples?

    8.  Take and defend some position on the problem of indirect force.

    9.  Defend Davidson's deflationary theory of metaphor against one or more of our objections, or come up with a further objection of your own.

    10.  Ditto Searle's Gricean theory of metaphor.

    11.  Davidson and Searle agree more than they disagree (Robert Fogelin lumps the two together under the heading of "fecund falsehood" theories).  Pursue an alternate approach of your own, possibly with the aid of Kittay's work if you have read ahead.