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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Searle’s famous attempt at what might loosely be called deriving ought from is has received much critical attention; but the main lines of attack on his attempt have been (as Searle himself has shown) irrelevant, mistaken, or otherwise defective. I shall here offer an account of what, I feel, really centrally has gone wrong with his attempt. I shall use the version of the derivation attempt which is found in Searle’s book, Speech Acts.
The attempted derivation has, as its important steps, the following statements:
S uttered the words, “I hereby promise to perform A for you, H.”
S promised to perform A for H.
S placed himself under a (prima facie) obligation to perform A for H.
S is under a (prima facie) obligation to perform A for H.
S ought (prima facie) to do A for H.
I am very grateful to Professor David Braybrooke for his helpful criticisms and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. A version of this paper was read at the annual meetings of the Canadian Philosophical Association, June 1972.
2 Searle, John R. Speech Acts. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1970.Google Scholar Chapters 3 and 8.
3 Ibid., p. 177, adapted. Actually this is a form for many derivations, where variables are replaced by names of people, descriptions of acts, etc. ‘Conditions C’ here refers to a complicated list of conditions that make the locution a genuine promise, and not some other speech act (e.g., a prediction), and not meaningless. Examples of these conditions: Act A is a future act, predicated of S; it is not obvious to both S and H and S will do A in the normal course of events; etc. This list of conditions is found Ibid., pp. 57-62. I do not entirely agree with Searle's list, but I think that my disagreements make little difference to the substance of this paper, and I shall ignore them.
4 Ibid., pp. 177–178, adapted.
5 Ibid.
6 My telescoping does not burke any issues. I do not think that there is any problem in going from 2 to 5, although some commentators have thought this. The passage from 2 to 5 is basically, in my opinion, the replacement of synonymous expressions. The purpose of the telescoping is to make the evaluative nature of ‘s promised’ more perspicuous, by replacing it with a synonymous but clearly evaluative locution.
7 I am using “implies” here in a rather loose sense—not the normal logicians’ sense of logical implication, but rather to mean something like involves or suggests indirectly.