Promising

Chapter Three: Laced Up in Formulas: Contemporary Approaches Considered

CHAPTER THREE Laced Up in Formulas: Contemporary Approaches Considered Amidst all this bustle 'tis not reason, which carries the prize, but eloquence.. . . This victory is not gained by the men at arms, who manage the pike and sword; but by the trumpeters, drummers, and musicians of the army. DAVID HUME, A Treatise of Human Nature When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it. LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Philosophical Investigations C ollectively, the material cited in Chapter Two represents some of the best work in contemporary philosophy . The authors are well known and their contributions are much discussed in the literature. It is perhaps presumptuous to take them to task for failing to generate a theory of promise when they never intended to formulate such a theory to begin with. It would certainly be presumptuous if I were to offer an alternative approach along the lines of what we have just seen. Instead, I intend to offer an alternative method: to ask and address not only how promises create obligations but also how the practice of promise functions in our form of life. The latter is significantly different from asking how words create obligations. But getting to the point of actually offering an alternative approach to promise requires first a consideration and evaluation of the five contemporary approaches outlined in Chapter Two. 95 Copyrighted Material CHAPTER THREE The purpose of this critical chapter is to point out the ways in which these contemporary approaches-as indicative of a specific philosophical method-fail in their efforts to describe promise as a social practice. While it is true that none of the authors cited above claimed to be offering a theory of promise , it is more importantly true that none of their approaches could ever stand as a theory of promise. This is because each approach underdescribes the social practice of promise and lacks coherency as a theoretical model. To put the matter in structural terms, the five contemporary approaches examined herein are simply unable to support the load that promise as a social practice would put on them. To use George Eliot's language , these approaches are laced up in formulas and incapable of conceptualizing a human practice such as promise. The complexity of human interaction is replaced in these approaches by the complexity of philosophical jargon. If we are impressed by these linguistic performances, it is because we have forgotten the task that philosophy sets itself in seeking to explain and describe human behavior. Although each approach offers a detailed and impressive account of a facet of promise, none can function as a theory of promise on its own. The intent of my evaluation, then, is not to demonstrate the validity of one approach over another but to show that the whole lot of them represent a philosophical method that we are better off doing without, at least in terms of outlining a theory of promise. I am not concerned with picayune objections , as someone who is sympathetic with an approach but unhappy with some of its details might be. I am arguing for wholesale rejection. Paving the Road with Good Intentions I suggested in Chapter One that a theory of promise would approach promise with an open texture, interested in how the 96 Copyrighted Material Laced Up in Formulas practice arose and why; how practitioners come to learn to promise; and how they evaluate and judge other members of the practice. Such a theory would see promise as a relational and double-tensed practice that creates obligations, some of which function as grappling hooks and others of which function as pathfinders. It is not, I argued, a matter of defining promise by using a set of necessary and sufficient conditions but, instead, a matter of describing and explaining a complex social practice. It is disappointing that none of the approaches outlined herein comes close to satisfying this conception of a theory of promise. Each of them focuses on one or another aspect of promise: its rules, its intuitive clarity, its function, the promisor's intention, or the promisee's expectations. But none of them attempts to answer the larger questions. A successful approach to promise requires a wide range of techniques and methodologies. If we focus too much on the behavioral features of promise, as does P...