W.'s investigation of some instances of the conversational practice of 'deliberate ambiguity' (i.e. cases in which a sentence is uttered with two acts in mind) casts doubt on the usefulness of the performative hypothesis for pragmatics: the problem is that the performative hypothesis arose from a concern with syntax within a particular theoretical paradigm; by studying pragmatics one should not just be widening one's area of investigation, but taking an entirely different point of view on language.