"Awful Austrians"

There’s a difference between “not invoked verbally” and “violated.” But yes, “violating” these “laws” (sorry for the excessive scare quotes, but I need to keep this straight) does effectively obviate the possibility of making unambiguous statements. My point on that is simply that that final note about verbal contradictions preventing clear communication is the heart of the matter, and anything other than addressing that directly seems needlessly roundabout at best.

Re: Mises, Hoppe, etc. on performative contradiction, I was hoping someone would bring up quotes, because I’m too lazy to hunt them down and don’t want to attack any strawmen in case I’m mis-remembering. But generally I expect my specific criticism would always be that the statements in question are either obviously absurd anyway (“I’m not acting”), or in Hoppe’s case merely hypocritical (and below that in the post), not an actual performative contradiction.

EDIT: By the way, your definition of performative contradiction sounds reasonable, I just don’t think it will be necessary as there should always be other more direct paths to catching people when they make an obviously absurd statement.