Pragmatic factors in making and understanding promises

Abstract

Within his theory of speech acts, Searle (1965, 1969) has suggested that certain conditions must hold true for a promise to be successfully made. These include: (a) that the speaker's utterance place him or her under an obligation to fulfill the promise because it is conventionally recognized as a promise; (b) that promises can be made only in situations where the addressee prefers that the speaker do the action promised; and (c) that the promise cannot be made in contexts where the speaker would have done the promised action in the normal course of events. We examined people's intuitions regarding these pragmatic conditions by looking at how people make and understand promises. The results from three studies showed that the first two of Searle's conditions are extremely important to maintain if a promise is to be made or understood. However, it appears that people can make promises about actions that would be performed in the normal course of events. As such, these studies support the idea that promises ...