Promising is a device for obligating oneself. In a culture in which promising is available, people have a normative power that they would lack in the absence of this institution. By exercising this power—standardly through the utterance of a linguistic formula—one can bring about changes in the expectations of others in ways that enhance one's ability to pursue their goals and that foster relations of familiarity and trust.

The existence of a normative power of this kind seems philosophically puzzling: How can the utterance of a linguistic formula cause a change in the normative relations that obtain in the world? In response to this question, it might help to situate promising within the general theory of speech acts, noting that it is one of a range of illocutionary acts that may be performed with words (to be set aside such acts as asserting or commanding). In...