Designation and Performance: The Definition of the Real in the Language Functions in Plato and John L. Austin

Abstract

This paper aims at examining some aspects of the relationship between language and reality from the perspec-tive of two philosophers of undoubted importance to contem-porary thought: Plato and John L. Austin. From inevita-bly different times and traditions, both sought, in specific analyzes present in their intellectual legacy, to establish the forms of interaction of the cognos-cent subject with respect to the data that surround him: interactions that are not restricted to an activity of ordering reality, situational of the subject in the middle of the phenome-nal, but that sometimes means the execution of constituent operations of the same, amplifying the own dimension of the real. Mainly through Cratylus and John How To Do Things With Words it is intended to demonstrate that if designation was the first activity conceived for the organization of reality, the perfor-mative utterance, opposed to it in many characters, is a second linguistic operation fundamen-tal to the reve-lation of its other aspects.