Elephant speech acts are a step above strings, because the higher levels of the speech acts have a meaning independent of the application program.

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

• 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.claim0.842
  Seventh abstract claim.
• Elephant 2000 programs can perform some kinds of speech acts as genuinely as humans, including genuine promises.claim0.819
  McCarthy's position against Searle: computers can genuinely promise without requiring Searle's conditions (e.g., belief that fulfillment benefits recipient).
• 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.claim0.812
  Fifth abstract claim.
• Many kinds of human speech act are relative to social institutions that change, and the exchange of speech acts among computer programs will often involve the design of new institutions prescribing the effects of speech acts.claim0.785
  Claim about designing institutions for program speech acts.
• 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.claim0.783
  Fourth abstract claim.
• Many uses of speech acts do not require human-level intelligence for programs to perform them.claim0.780
  Key contention of paper: Elephant 2000 can support varying levels of AI capability without requiring full human intelligence.
• Speech acts are necessary in common sense informatic situations where agents with different goals and knowledge interact.claim0.758
  McCarthy's fundamental position: most important features of speech acts are independent of whether agents are human or machine.
• Elephant source programs may not need data structures, because they can refer directly to the past.claim0.738
  Third abstract claim.