Reducing promises to assertions

To promise something, I need to communicate something to you. What is that thing that I need to communicate to you? To a first approximation, what I need to communicate to you is that I am promising. But that’s circular: it says that promising is communicating that I am promising. This circularity is vicious, because it doesn’t distinguish promising from asking: asking is communicating that I am asking.

But now imagine I have a voice-controlled robot named Robby, and I have programmed him in such a way that I command him by asserting that Robby will do something because I have said he will do it. Thus, to get him to vacuum the living room, I assert “Robby will immediately vacuum the living room because I say so.” As long as what I say is within the range of Robby’s abilities, any statement I make in Robby’s vicinity about what he will do because I say he will do it is automatically true. This is all easily imaginable.

Now, back to promises. Perhaps it works like this. I have a limited power to control the normative sphere. This normative power generates an effect in normative space precisely when I communicate that I am generating that effect. Thus, I can promise to buy you lunch by asserting “I will be obligated to you to buy you lunch.” And I permit you to perform heart surgery by asserting “You will cease to have a duty of respect for my autonomy not to perform heart surgery on me.” As long as what I say is within my normative capabilities, by communicating that I am making it true by communicating it, I make it be true, just as Robby will do what I assert he will do because of my say-so, as long as it is within his physical capabilities.

This solves the circularity problem for promising because what I am communicating is not that I am promising, but the normative effect of the promising:

1. x promises to ϕ to y if and only if x successfully exercises a communicative normative power to gain an obligation-to-y by ϕing

2. a communicative normative power for a normative effect F is a normative power whose object is F and whose successful exercise requires the circumstance that one express that one is producing F by communicating that one is so doing.

There are probably some further tweaks to be made.

Of course, in practice, we communicate the normative effect not by describing it explicitly, but by using set phrases, contextual cues, etc.

This technique allows us to reduce promising, consenting, requesting, commanding and other illocutionary forces to normative power and communicating, which is basically a generalized version of assertion. But we cannot account for communicating or asserting in this way—if we try to do that, we do get vicious circularity.