Fun semantic paradoxes

If you're told "Don't do anything Jones tells you to do today", and the speaker is Jones, have you done what you were told to?

If you promise to do today whatever I ask for, and I ask you to do nothing today that a fool asks you for, but unbeknownst to me I am a fool, have you done what you promised?

If I say: "I'll have whatever the chef recommends" and the chef recommends that I have what I ordered, and I get fried bananas, have I got my order?

The promise theory of assertion

I am not claiming that this theory is correct. But it seems to generate all the right normative predictions. Observe that there is no way to reduce the illocutionary force of promises to that of assertions. To promise is not just to assert that one will do something or that one intends to do something or anything like that. But there appears to be a way to reduce the illocutionary force of assertions to that of promises.

I can promise to do all sorts of things For instance, I can promise to raise my right hand only when my left ear itches. Among the things I can promise is the making of an utterance. For instance, I can promise that I will only utter "I am bored" on Saturday afternoons. I shall use "utter" in a way that does not imply assertion: when one asserts "I am bored", one also utters it, but one can utter it without asserting it. One can utter it in denial. (A: Tell me something false. B: I am bored.) One can utter it as an example of a sentence when teaching a language. One can utter it on stage. Etc.

The basic theory is that the normative effect of asserting s is exactly the same as the normative effect of:

1. I promise to next utter only something true. s.

Here, the "s" is not an assertion, but a mere utterance, like when one uses a sentence as an example. More strongly (and some of what I say below applies to that strengthening), we can take every assertion of "s" to be contextual shorthand for something like (1), where "s" is explicitly uttered, and the promise is implicit in the tone of voice, context, etc.

If you are drawn to belief, justified belief or knowledge norms of assertion, replace "true" with "believed by me", "justifiedly believed by me" or "known by me" in (1). This will lose you some of what the theory can do for you, but it may still be a better theory than other theories of assertion.

The promise theory of assertion explains why it's typically morally wrong to assert something one doesn't believe. For if one doesn't believe that s is true, in making the promise in (1) while intending it to be followed by s, one is making a promise that one intends to break. Thus, we also get a reduction of the moral wrongness of lying to the moral wrongness of insincere promising.

Next consider retraction. Here it matters that we have "true" instead of one of the doxastic or epistemic things in (1). Observe that there are multiple kinds of cases where an apology is called for in a promise, including these:

2. I promised to A, never intending to A.
3. I promised to A, I failed to A, and I was culpable because I was not justified in believing that I was in fact Aing when I wasn't.
4. I promised to A, I failed to A, but I wasn't culpable because I justifiedly believed that I was in fact Aing when I wasn't.
5. I promised to A, and then I acted in a way that I didn't know was fulfillment of the promise.
6. I promised to A, I did A, but I shouldn't have promised or done A, because promising and doing A was bad for some other reason.

The kind of apology is different in these cases. For instance, in cases 2, 3 and 6, I offer something more like a mea culpa. In case 4, I offer something closer to an "excuse me". What I offer in case 5 depends on further details. Taking (1) to be equivalent to asserting "s", the above cases yield the following cases where apology is needed for assertion:

7. I asserted "s", not intending to assert something true. (This divides into two subtypes. On one subtype, I intended to assert something that I believed false—this correponds to intending to do something that one believes to be a breaking of the promise while making the promise. On the other subtype, I simply didn't care about truth and falsity, which is BS, and that corresponds to simply failing to intend to keep the promise one is making.)
8. I asserted "s", but "s" was false, and I was culpable because I was not justified in believing that "s" is true.
9. I asserted "s", but "s" was false, but I wasn't culpable because I was justified in believing that "s" is true.
10. I asserted "s", but I didn't know that "s" was true.
11. I asserted "s", but I shouldn't have said "s", even though "s" is true, but I shouldn't have asserted "s", because asserting "s" was bad for some other reasons. (E.g., it was the revealing of privileged information.)

Retraction on this view is a form of apology. One has at least two reasons for apologizing for not keeping a promise: one is to express an appropriate form of regret (different in the difference cases) and the other is to inform the other that the promise wasn't kept (the other could have relied on it). Exact analogues hold for assertion.

Dan Johnson points out to me that the above lets one accommodate the insights behind norms of assertion other than truth, by giving a variety of modes of assertion failure, which modes fit with the failure to act in accordance with these modified norms. I don't think one can do this if one replaces "true" in (1) with anything epistemic, so (1) with "true" is the best version.

Here now is an interesting consequence. If someone I justifiedly trust promises to do something, I have reason to believe that she will do it. The present account implies that if someone I justifiedly trust asserts something, I have reason to believe that the assertion is true. For she has promised to utter only something true, and so when I learn that she has uttered "s", I have reason to believe that "s" is true. So trust in testimony reduces to trust in promises.

The account predicts that just as there are varying strengths of promises, there will be strengths of assertion. This prediction is borne out. Further analysis is needed to see how to flesh out the parallel strengths. And we can take the colloquial form of assertion "I promise you that p" as a shorthand for a stronger version of (1).

Likewise, denial can be handled very similarly: a denial involves a promise to utter something false.

Sincerity conditions

The following seem plausible necessary conditions on sincerity:

• Assertion: If I sincerely asserted that p, I intended (at least) that I not be asserting something not true.
• Promise: If I sincerely promised you that p, I intended (at least) that I not be promising something I wouldn't do.
• Command: If I sincerely commanded you that p, I intended (at least) that I not be commanding something you wouldn't do.
• Performative declaration: If I sincerely performatively declared that p, I intended (at least) that I not be performatively declaring something that doesn't come off.

(I intend at least p iff I intend q where q is either p or a strengthening of p. Below I shall for simplicity just talk of "intending p" when I mean "intending at least p".)

These may not be the standard sincerity conditions for these illocutionary acts. More standard conditions would be something like this: if I sincerely commanded you that p, I intended that p or I desired that p, etc. However, these more standard sincerity conditions are incorrect. In earlier posts I've shown this for assertions and promises. The examples adapt to commands, questions and performative declarations. For instance, suppose I send you a command by mail. I may not care at all whether you get the command, but intend that if you get it, you fulfill it (imagine a case of an action which is only an exercise in obedience—it is pointless unless you actually get the command). Interestingly, the sincerity condition for commands rules out some interesting cases. It is, on this view, insincere to command something with the intention that the commandee should fail to fulfill the command and thus earn a punishment. (This rules out certain readings of Scripture, assuming that God is always sincere.) Likewise, if I name a ship "the Queen Mary", I am being insincere if the ship already has been named something else (what if it's already been named "the Queen Mary"?) and I have no authority to change the name. But I need not intend that the ship should have the name "the Queen Mary". I may have reluctantly agreed to try to name it thus, but hope that something will interrupt my naming.

What is striking about the above sincerity conditions is that they all involve truth. Granted, promises are restricted to what I will do and commands to what you will do, but all of these illocutionary acts involve a proposition, and in all of them sincerity requires that I intend not to make the illocutionary act with respect to a false proposition. Curiously, thus, in all these cases, sincerity involves an intention to avoid falsehood. There is thus a deep similarity between asserting, promising, commanding and performatively declaring.

Is this common necessary condition on sincerity also sufficient? No, for if it were, then if p reports a future action of one's own, one could sincerely promise that p under exactly the same conditions under which one could sincerely assert that p. And that isn't so. For instance, I can sincerely promise that I will quit smoking, even though I expect I won't, but I cannot sincerely assert that I will quit smoking when I expect I won't. So the sincerity conditions of some of the above four illocutionary acts must add something to the common condition. I do not know what the appropriate addenda are.

Is what I said above applicable to all illocutionary acts? Well, not directly. Certainly it is not the case that sincerely denying p requires that I intend not to deny something false! However, a surprisingly large number of illocutionary acts can be rephrased so that the above rule should apply. For instance:

• "I deny that p" → "I assert that not p", and this is sincere only if I intend not to be asserting something that isn't true.
• "I congratulate you that p" → "I congratulate you that the good G has befallen you", and this is sincere only if I intend not to be congratulating you on something that isn't true (i.e., in a case where G either isn't good or didn't befall you).
• "I thank you that p" → "I thank you that you provided me with good G", and this is sincere only if I intend not to be thanking you for something that isn't true.
• "I protest that p" → "I protest that you are doing the bad thing B", and this is sincere only if I intend not to be protesting something that isn't true.

In these cases, there is a deep propositional content that differs from the surface propositional content. "I thank you that you gave me a cookie" has a shallow content that you gave me a cookie but for purposes of analysis should be seen as having the deep content that you gave me a cookie which it was good for me to get. (That is why there is a pragmatic contradiction in saying "I thank you that you gave me a cookie that was bad for me to get." And of course "I thank you that 2+2=4" is malformed, unless addressed to Descartes' God.)

If the above moves work, then a large class of illocutionary acts have a common necessary sincerity condition that involves the truth of the proposition forming the deep propositional content of the act. Is this true of all illocutionary acts? I don't know. Is joking or asserting-on-stage an illocutionary act? If so, it would be hard to defend the generality of the claim (though maybe not impossible).