A teoria dos atos de fala à luz d’A Estrutura das Revoluções Científicas

Drawing on the concepts of paradigm and puzzles from Thomas S. Kuhn’s seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, this article takes as its starting point the hypothesis that, through his theory of speech acts, John L. Austin established a paradigm in both linguistics and the philosophy of language that, like any paradigm, has left behind a set of puzzles for posterity. To confirm this hypothesis, I will attempt to (1) trace some of these puzzles, (2) examine how John R. Searle addresses them, and (3) determine whether, in many cases, Austin himself gives any indication of being at least partially aware of their existence. The ultimate goal of this article, therefore, is to show that certain modifications Searle introduced into the theory of speech acts were necessary to solve some of the most important puzzles of the Austinian paradigm.