constative

Making meaningful reference within constative discourse is a thoroughly historical skill.

Normative is usually contrasted with Positivist (i.e. descriptive, explanatory, or constative) claims when describing types of theories, beliefs, or propositions.

"The Father Loses a Name: Constative Identity in Le Père Goriot".

J.L. Austin introduced the concept of the performative, contrasted in his writing with "constative" (i.e. descriptive) utterances.

Constative discourse - the making of statements of fact - for instance need only rely on identification, and reidentification, of items for it to prove effective in use.

Margolis inveighs against postmodernists of Rorty's stamp, claiming that they risk disabling constative discourse in their objectivist fears of privilege.

This seems like a simple statement, what the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin termed a constative utterance: a base level of communication, with no metaphor or secondary meanings attached.

To return to Austin's distinction between constative and performative utterances: Austin eventually concluded correctly that there are no purely constative utterances.

Breaking with analytic philosophy, Austin argued in How to Do Things With Words that a "performative utterance," cannot be said to be either true or false, as a constative utterance might be.

Therefore, historical memory and consensus, together with a narratizing ability, are all that are necessary to ensure the stability of what we make reference to, there need be nothing essential at all in things themselves, for our constative discourse to be able to flourish and even thrive.

Having shown that all utterances perform actions, even apparently constative ones, Austin famously discarded the distinction between "performative" and "constative" utterances halfway through the lecture series that became the book, and replaced it with a three-level framework: