 That aside, speech act theories of meaning have received their own share of criticism over the years. One objection to a theory like Alston’s—and the acceptability of his theory can’t be pursued at length here—is that it explicates sentence meaning in terms of speech act potential, and thus requires that the illocutionary acts that a sentence can be used to perform be identifiable independently of and prior to the meaning of the sentence used to perform those illocutionary acts. But that’s impossible, the objection runs, and in fact gets things backward. To identify the act of stating that the door is open, rather than, say, the act of asking for an ice cream cone, as an act that the sentence “The door is open” can be used to perform—to identify the former but not the latter as part of the sentence’s speech act potential—requires that the meaning of the sentence first be understood and identified. Absent an understanding of its meaning, it’s anyone’s guess what acts it could be used to perform. Speech act potential is a function of meaning, not, as the theory has it, meaning a function of speech act potential.