Harris (1978) discusses the ‘descriptivist’ and ‘non-descriptivist’ interpretations of performative utterances; on the former account, a performative utterance is an assertion, and may thus be true or false, depending on whether the speech act is felicitous or not, and on the latter account, the performative utterance itself constitutes the act in question, and is not an assertion, and therefore has no truth value.1 He presents the following argument against the descriptivist position. A speech act (I apologize, say) may be reported by using the same verb non-performatively: He apologized. This report, however, can be true even when the reported speech act was infelicitous in some way, e.g., He apologized, but to the wrong person. He claims that utterances of this type create a dilemma for the descriptivist position. If the assertion reported is considered to be true in this case, then its truth value does not depend on the success or failure of the performance.