Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 13.07.1981, Blaðsíða 249
Promises and Games
239
Searle seems to me to be clearly right that promises are speech acts
or symbolic acts, presupposing in general the conventionally established
way in which certain utterances are to be taken on specific occasions.
He is also right in thinking that in promising one is not necessarily
placing oneself under a moral obligation. But Searle’s general approach
can, it seems to me, be faulted, in that it insufficiently stresses that each
separate promise is made with a specific point, and that this point is a
major factor in assessing whether one ought to keep the promise. Thus
I promise my father to stop smoking because he believes that it is bad
for me. I find out that he no longer believes this, and I also believe that
smoking is harmless. Ought I still to keep my promise? Some might
say that it would be dishonourable to break the promise, and others
might not. Ought I to break my promise, even although I know that
nothing good will come of keeping it, apart from avoiding the fact that
my father will think that I am not a man of honour, although he agrees
that smoking is quite harmless? Furthermore, there are great variations
between individuals as to how much one should take into account the
feelings of the promisee, the interests and characters of the people con-
cerned, and their knowledge of each other and their personal relations.
There is just too much variation in what is taken to be acceptable
practice within the same community for the analogy with the appeal to
rules of well established games to be at all helpful. There is no disagree-
ment about the rules when one is playing chess. Settling what is in a
Particular case permissible is therefore relatively straight-forward. But
the practice of promises does not have well formulated clear-cut rules.
There are of course generally accepted conventions determining the
conditions under which the critical “But you promised” may be legi-
hmately made. But an individual may feel the charge to be unreason-
able in lots of cases, without thereby thinking of himself either as
aPpealing to a pre-existing ‘game’, or as proposing a modification of
ihe game or that an altemative game, should be played. One of the
masons for this is that endless arguments may arise about whether or
"ot a man made it obvious that he was joking. “You had no right to
take this as a promise, it was an obvious joke” is sometimes a defense
against censure, acceptable to some speakers of a language, but not
°tbers. A sense of humour is a most variable feature of human nature.
Arguments may arise about whether or not an alleged promiser
should have known that a particular action was so important to a prom-