{"id":49747,"date":"2026-09-17T15:20:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T15:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/how-to-promise-and-how-to-keep-promises-from-breaking\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T15:20:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T15:20:10","slug":"how-to-promise-and-how-to-keep-promises-from-breaking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/how-to-promise-and-how-to-keep-promises-from-breaking\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts<\/a>, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them<\/a>. Nothing betrays our partitions more plainly than our promises. <\/p>\n

False promises \u2014 those people make not intending to keep \u2014 are easier to comprehend, for they are simply a species of lying: garden-variety violations of trust. But it is our true promises \u2014 those we have every intention of keeping \u2014 that, when broken, most imperil us, most reveal our contradictions, most painfully violate our self-trust. <\/p>\n

Even the most sincere promise is but a tenuous handshake \u2014 not between us and others, but between our present selves and our future selves. Nothing is more discomposing to our self-image than watching ourselves break a true promise on the edge of the awful recognition that our future selves are only ever a fantasy of who we would like to be, not a prediction of who we will become. Nothing, therefore, is more fundamental to self-trust \u2014 which is the basis of self-respect, which is the basis of respect for others \u2014 than learning to make keepable promises. <\/p>\n

The English philosopher of language J.L. Austin<\/strong> (March 26, 1911\u2013February 8, 1960) offers a field guide to making promises and keeping them from breaking in How to Do Things with Words<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the posthumously published adaptation of the William James Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1955.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWords are events, they do things, change things,\u201d wrote<\/a> Ursula K. Le Guin, whose praise for Austin led me to his wonderful book. \u201cTo say<\/em> something is to do<\/em> something,\u201d he writes in it, \u201cby<\/em> saying or in<\/em> saying something we are doing something.\u201d <\/p>\n

Austin terms the things our words do performatives<\/em> and identifies five classes of them in language: verdictives<\/em> (the pronouncement of a verdict by an arbiter of some sort, though the verdict may not be final and may be rather an open-ended reckoning or appraisal), exercitives<\/em> (the exercise of power, rights, or influence, such as in voting or warning), behabitives<\/em> (a miscellaneous group having to do with attitudes and social mores, such as apologizing, congratulating, condoling, and giving praise), expositives<\/em> (the way we use words in arguments or conversation, with statements like \u201cI agree\u201d or \u201cI assume\u201d), and commissives<\/em> (espousals or declarations of intention that commit us to something, of which promises are a prime example). <\/p>\n

Of all the performatives, a promise is the most binding, the most revelatory of personhood. It is not, Austin argues, merely a mechanical act of utterance that bends language in a certain direction of thought \u2014 it is \u201can inward and spiritual act\u201d that inclines the self toward a certain direction of action. He writes:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI promise to\u2026\u201d obliges me \u2014 puts on record my spiritual assumption of a spiritual shackle.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This commitment begins with the simple prerequisite that \u201cthe person uttering the promise should have a certain intention\u201d \u2014 namely, to keep their word, which doesn\u2019t only represent something but does<\/em> something. He illustrates the performative and its pitfalls:<\/p>\n

\n

For instance, the utterance \u201cI do\u201d (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony. Here we should say that in saying these words we are doing something \u2014 namely, marrying, rather than reporting something, namely that we are marrying. And the act of marrying, like, say, the act of betting, is at least preferably (though still not accurately) to be described as saying certain words, rather than as performing a different, inward and spiritual, action of which these words are merely the outward and audible sign. That this is so can perhaps hardly be proved, but it is, I should claim, a fact.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Violeta L\u00f3piz for At the Drop of a Cat<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Many things can go wrong with all performatives, can haunt our words and our promises, can breach the handshake of trust \u2014 they are what Austin calls the infelicities<\/em> that infect language. He divides them into two classes: misfires<\/em> (\u201cacts purposeful but void\u201d) and abuses<\/em> (\u201cacts professed but hollow\u201d), insincerity being an instance of abuse that infects a promise with infelicity. He considers what it takes for a promise to be felicitous: <\/p>\n

\n

[When] promising I must certainly intend: but I must also think what I promise feasible (must intend to do it, not merely to try to do it) and think perhaps that the promisee thinks it to be to his advantage, or think that it is to his advantage.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

To do or to say these things is to make plain how the action is to be taken or understood, what action it is. And so it is with putting in the expression \u201cI promise that.\u201d It is not a description, because (1) it could not be false, nor, therefore, true; (2) saying \u201cI promise that\u201d (if happy, of course) makes it<\/em> a promise, and makes it<\/em> unambiguously a promise. Now we can say that such a performative formula as \u201cI promise\u201d makes it clear how what is said is to be understood and even conceivably that the formula \u201cstates that\u201d a promise has been made; but we cannot say that such utterances are true or false, nor that they are descriptions or reports.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Promises that are well made and well understood bind us in honorable human relationships<\/a>. Austin writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Our word \u2014 the self-trust that we can keep it, the faith that it can holds us \u2014 is also a barometer of our relationship to ourselves. Today, in a world that has normalized overpromising and underdelivering, a world in which people habitually make plans and promises and commitments only to cancel them, the discipline of keeping our word is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance. And when our word does break even on the finest point of our best intentions \u2014 we are, after all, human and therefore perennially imperfect predictors of ourselves \u2014 we are left to apprentice ourselves in the art of amends<\/a> as we search for an apology large enough to blanket our self-betrayal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

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\n

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We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions more plainly than our promises. False promises \u2014 those people make not intending to keep \u2014 are easier to comprehend, for they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-life"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-25 11:19:34","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gpnewswire.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}