Elephant programs that interact non-trivially with the outside world can have both input-output specifications, relating the programs inputs and outputs, and accomplishment specifications concerning what the program accomplishes in the world. These concepts are respectively generalizations of the philosophers' illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts.

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• Elephant programs themselves can be represented as sentences of logic. Their extensional properties follow from this representation without an intervening theory of programming or anything like Hoare axioms.claim0.871
  Fourth abstract claim.
• Elephant 2000 programs can perform some kinds of speech acts as genuinely as humans, including genuine promises.claim0.833
  McCarthy's position against Searle: computers can genuinely promise without requiring Searle's conditions (e.g., belief that fulfillment benefits recipient).
• The Elephant programmer in verifying his program need not show that the promise will be fulfilled because it was made. It is enough that he show it will be fulfilled.claim0.822
  Rejection of one of Dorschel's conditions for happy performance.
• Human use of speech acts involves intelligence. Elephant 2000 is on the borderline of AI, but the article emphasizes the Elephant usages that do not require AI.claim0.820
  Seventh abstract claim.
• Elephant speech acts are a step above strings, because the higher levels of the speech acts have a meaning independent of the application program.claim0.812
  Advantage of speech acts over plain strings.
• Programs that engage in commercial transactions assume obligations on behalf of their owners in exchange for obligations assumed by other entities. It may be part of the specifications of an Elephant 2000 programs that these obligations are exchanged as intended, and this too can be expressed by a logical sentence.claim0.812
  Sixth abstract claim.
• Elephant source programs may not need data structures, because they can refer directly to the past.claim0.802
  Third abstract claim.
• Communication inputs and outputs are in an I-O language whose sentences are meaningful speech acts approximately in the sense of philosophers and linguists. These include questions, answers, offers, acceptances, declinations, requests, permissions and promises.claim0.799
  First key claim in the abstract.