our attention from the meaning of a sentence to its force. To perform a locutionary act is ipso facto to perform as well an illocutionary act. But a meaningful sentence can be uttered with different forces. To use Searle’s example, the sentence ‘I am going to do it’ has one literal meaning (or propositional content) but can have the force of any one or more of a variety of illocutionary acts; the utterance can amount to a promise, a prediction, a threat, a warning, a statement of intention and so forth.32 In saying something, I am frequently doing something; in our example, I am doing one or more of the following: promising, predicting, threatening, warning, asserting, et cetera. Which of these illocutionary acts I perform, or what force my utterance has, will depend on the context in which I speak. It is on the illocutionary forces of a verdict that I shall concentrate in this essay. In saying ‘I find the defendant (not) guilty’ or ‘I find the defendant (not) liable’, the word ‘find’ performs the role of, in Austin’s terminology, an ‘explicit performative verb’.33 It is what Searle calls an ‘illocutionary force-indicating device’.34 Used in the first person indicative active form, the verb indicates what act the speaker is performing in making that utterance; it tells us how we should take the expressed proposition. The term stands alongside other similar explicit force-indicating devices such as ‘promise’, ‘apologise’ and ‘warn’. If I say I promise you something, I make it clear to you that you should take what I say with the force of a promise, thus conveying to you my commitment to do as I promised; my utterance is not merely a prediction of what I am likely to do. Unfortunately, the force of the term ‘find’, as used in the trial context, is certainly nowhere as clear as the force of ‘promise’, ‘apologise’ or ‘warn’. As I will argue, ‘find’ bears many dimensions of force. Searle distinguishes the ‘force’ of an illocutionary act from its ‘point’. A request and a command share the same point of getting someone to do something but they are patently of different forces.35 Part of the illocutionary point of both a request and a command is to get the addressee to do the act in question; it is to get the world to fit the propositional content of the utterance. Sometimes the direction of fit runs in the opposite direction. When I am reporting to you an incident, I am trying to get the propositional content of my utterance to fit the world as I saw it.36 The verdict is complex not only because it has multiple illocutionary points but also because those multiple points do not share one direction of fit. A systematic study of these illocutionary dimensions is conducted in the section after the next.