 According to Austin, there is more involved in any such assessment than a simple comparison of requirements imposed by linguistic meaning with the facts. Reflection on the assessment of actions in which we speak and the speech acts that classify them indicates two things: first, the distinction between assessment as to happiness and assessment as to truth is ultimately unprincipled; and, second, some mixture of various types of assessment applies to all, or nearly all, utterances. These ideas appear to be the basis for a cryptic claim of Austin’s  (mentioned above as topic (4)).  Exploiting the various modes of appraisal to distinguish five very general classes of speech act verbs, Austin writes that