From Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography

 I read this book recently and the following passage jumped out at me:

It is perhaps worth pointing out that [the Ostroms'] approach to teaching stems from a particular philosophy of language, most prominently associated with John Searle and Michael Devitt. Vincent Ostrom was particularly fond of Searle’s Speech Acts. One of the key questions in the philosophy of language is “What is meaning?” To put it differently, when can we say that we truly understand something? Philosophers like Searle and Devitt argue that the meaning of a text (be it a single sentence or a larger text) is nothing but the set of empirical conditions that would have to hold in the real world for us to accept that what the text is saying is indeed true. In other words, to understand the meaning of a text, you have to be able to identify the ways in which the world would be different depending on whether the text were true or false.

Emphasis mine. I read this and thought, "Whoa, this is a theory of language?" I didn't think it was such a novel idea that people should mean something when they speak or write. I haven't read Searle's Speech Acts, but I feel like I've internalized this concept. When I write something, I interrogate each sentence, ask myself if supporting links are needed (if it's a factual claim), ask myself what implications there are (if it's a logical claim), etc. I think this is all just good hygiene.
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For some added context, this is the immediately preceding paragraph:

We can see the success of the Bloomington School as emerging from this challenging approach to teaching that Vincent Ostrom employed, which was followed and expanded by Elinor Ostrom: “By early 1970s Lin’s courses applying the Workshop’s theoretical conceptions in rigorous fieldwork of police studies as well as in other modes of quantitative analysis and modeling, including game theory, had become part of the core curriculum, complementing Vincent’s ‘macro theoretic’ approach with empirical studies and ‘micro theory’” (Sabetti 2011). What made Vincent and Elinor Ostrom such successful intellectual and academic entrepreneurs, was not just that they had spotted neglected opportunities for research, but also that they developed their teaching curriculum and style to complement the research agenda.