Considering the substantial philosophical controversy which followed John Searle's well-known publication on how to derive an "ought" from an "'is,"1 it would only be with some hesitation that one would venture to resuscitate the issues and again challenge the argument. The history of the controversy shows that, for the most part, the philosophical camp eventually divided into well-entrenched supporters and dissenters. But after the dust had settled and the confrontation had begun to look like a philosophical deadlock, Searle's recent reformulation of the problem2 has again made it fair game. Searle's latest version accomplishes at least two things: (1) it clarifies the original argument by placing it in the context of a general theory of speech acts and thereby eliminates many objections which were really irrelevancies or due to misunderstanding; and (2) it invites and justifies new challenges to the argument by those who are prepared to accept Searle's hypothesis that speaking a language is an institution of rule-governed intentional behavior grounded on constitutive rules, that a theory of language is part of a theory of action, and that the speech act is the fundamental unit of analysis in any adequate philosophical analysis of language. In short, now that the contextual framework of the argument is clearly delineated, the controversy moves to a new level. In this paper, in the context of the theory of speech acts, I want to (1) examine Searle's claim that the "naturalistic-fallacy fallacy" is the source of a mistaken belief that evaluative statements cannot be logically deduced from descriptive statements alone; (2) criticize Searle's interpretation of his "is" -4 "ought" argument by showing that, just as Searle distinguishes between "brute facts" and "institutional facts." he must also