How to do things with things other than just words

Abstract

I will confine myself to promising. Let’s say, ‘I promise to review this book favorably’. Here’s the problem with Alston in a nutshell. He writes: ‘It would be grossly dishonest of me to promise to get you the number-two job in the Defense Department. But I can make the promise’ (p. 87). What we have to ask is whether the use of the word ‘promise’ in the second of Alston’s sentences is grammatical. That is, if I am in no position to promise — in the social, intersubjective sense, and there is no other sense I know of — can I be said to have promised as such? Surely ‘uttering a false promise’ is part of a distinct language-game from ‘promising’. However, Alston appears able to call such an utterance ‘a promise’ by virtue of the fact that, like some, but not all, speech-act theorists, he is committed to finding the illocutionary force of an utterance in terms (inter alia, though most importantly) of its ‘speaker meanings’. But, as Wittgenstein pointed out, people can say whatever they want; yet that does not mean they can mean whatever they want. I can say ‘glub, glub glub’ and want to mean ‘Seven bottles of beer and a packet of chips, please’ — but it won’t get me anywhere. Ditto: ‘I promise you the number-two job in the Defense Department’ can be said — that’s for sure. But it can’t ‘mean’ that a promise has been issued and taken. That is, intersubjectively, a socially warrantable object called ‘a promise’ cannot be said to have occurred. Unlike, for example, Austin and Searle, Alston wants to be able to get beyond questions of felicity, honesty, sincerity, and (it would seem) sheer possibility, by wanting ‘an account that will cover all clear cases of promising — sincere or insincere, well-advised or misguided, explicit, or elliptical’ (p. 54). Again, we have to ask whether the use of the word ‘clear’ in this sentence is grammatical. Is promising ‘clear’ if it is, for