This paper analyses the controversy between Jürgen Habermas and John Searle on speech acts. It presents briefly the main features of Habermas’s theory: the concept of validity claims, the cooperative conception of illocutionary goals, and the distinction between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. Afterwards it analyses Searle’s main objections against Habermas: the distinction between understanding and agreement, and the idea that validity claims are not constitutive elements of all speech acts. Although Searle’s arguments seem convincing, this article finally shows that some problems about Searle’s taxonomy of speech acts make Habermas’ theses more plausible.