A speech act's direction of fit characterizes the way in which acts of that type are related to the world.
In fact, she said, we know what our intentions are without observation; and between someone observing, and someone intending and performing, an action, there is what she called a difference in the "direction of fit" (of action to thought).
(Searle also recognized a "null" direction of fit for speech acts, such as greetings and thanks, that match neither words to the world nor the world to words.) Finally, the expressed psychological state of a speech act is the belief, desire, intention, or other mental state that a speaker necessarily expresses by performing an act of that type.
It has a world-to-mind direction of fit.
Not all speech acts appear to have direction of fit.
They have different and opposite "direction of fit".
Since Anscombe, desires are said to have a "direction of fit," and one that is the opposite to the "direction of fit" of beliefs.
That is to say, whereas beliefs have a "mind-to-world" direction of fit, desires have a "world-to-mind" direction of fit.
Speech acts such as assertions and predictions have word-to-world direction of fit, while speech acts such as commands have world-to-word direction of fit.
See Humberstone 1992 for a fuller discussion of the notion of direction of fit.
(For related discussion of direction of fit, see the entry on speech acts).
