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Promises and Reliance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Páll S. Árdal
Páll S. Árdal
Affiliation:
Queen's University
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Extract

In a Recent paper to The Joint Session of the AristotelianSociety and Mind Association Professor Neil MacCormick makes some interesting observations about the nature of promises and the source of the obligation to keep them. He rejects the view that an act can count as a promise only because a certain practice exists in a society. One may on the contrary well understand what promises are and know how to make them without there being any special convention making possible the speech act of promising which amounts to no more than …“an utterance of the speaker's about his own future conduct which is essentially characterized by the speaker's intending his addressee to take it as being intended to induce the addressee to rely upon the speaker's taking the action in question.” One needs no special rule to explain why promise-breaking is wrong for …“the fact of the addressee's reliance on the promisor is sufficient ground for asserting that the promisor has an obligation to keep his word.” To bring home the point, MacCormick contrasts promising with divorcing by the simple utterance of 'I divorce thee, I divorce thee.' This is intelligible as an act of divorcing only by presupposing a convention that allows a divorce to be effected in this way. In performing the act by the appropriate formula the person is invoking the conventional rules that must obtain in the society if the act is to be successful. Searle, we are told, fails to see that promises are quite different in that they …“are explicable in terms of an intention to bring about a specific perlocutionary effect, and an intention that that intention be recognized” It is neither here nor there to point out, as Searle does, that ‘I predict’ and ‘I intend’ like ‘I promise’ tend to create expectations for the effect a promise is intended to achieve is reliance and not simply an expectation.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 1976 , pp. 54 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1976

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References

1 Voluntary Obligations and Normative Powers: Symposium with Joseph Raz; Aristotelian Society. Suppl. Vol. XLVI (1972).

2 Op. cit. p. 62.

3 Ibid.

4 Op. cit. p. 63.

5 Speech Acts, by Searle, John R., Cambridge (1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Op. cit. p. 70.

7 Hume, David. Treatise of Human Nature, Books 2 and 3, ed. Ardal, Pall S.. Fontana Philosophy Classics. 1972. p. 251Google Scholar.

8 Since promises are, as I shall argue, essentially symbolic acts, there seems to be needed some human convention to determine the conditions under which it is legitimate to take an utterance as a promise rather than a joke, a threat, a prediction or a mere statement of intention. call promises symbolic rather than linguistic acts for the simple reason that one may make promises by nodding or shaking one's head, and it is not clear that these acts involve the use of language though they do duty for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ respectively. Nothing of deeper significance hinges upon the use of 'symbolic' in this context.

9 See my Motives Intentions and Responsibility. The Philosophical Quarterly. Vol. XV (1965)Google Scholar.

10 MacCormick has kindly given me permission to make my own use of a modified version of his example.

11 ‘And That's a Promise’, the Philosophical Quarterly Vol. XVIII (1968)Google Scholar.

12 When MacDonald starts to lower the rope Jones may think that this promises well, or holds out a promise of rescue. Notice the difference be- tween this kind of promise and a promise by MacDonald to save Jones, which is essentially symbolic. See footnote 8.

13 Those who claim that the use of ‘I promise’ to make a threat is a misuse of language are clearly in error in spite of Austin's, J. L. strange remark that …“perhaps we ought not to allow the formula ‘I promise you that I'll thrash you’. How to do Things with Words, Oxford, 1962, p. 30Google Scholar.

14 See ‘And That's a Promise’ and also ‘Reply to New on Promises’, Philosophical Quarterly XIX (1969)Google Scholar. Although I do not in the earlier article use the word ‘guarantee’, note the following statement from the latter: "“If the circumstances are such that one would normally be understood to be committing oneself to doing something for the other person, the disclaimer ‘I am not promising you’ would most often suggest hesitancy as to whether one can guarantee performance”. (P.Q. 1969, p. 261).

15 See Narveson, Jan, Promising Expecting and Utility, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 12 1971, p. 220Google Scholar.