There are words and phrases that we use in everyday speech that constitute an act of doing something, and these words and phrases have come to be known as “performative utterances.” They perform a certain act when they are felicitous and fail to perform a certain act when they are infelicitous. Performatives may be distinguished from non-performative utterances, ‘constatives’, which are true or false. Wedding vows are a unique kind of performative utterance: a promise. Since a promise refers to a future act where an obligation is carried out or not, the performative aspect of the promise occurs not at the time of the utterance but at some future time when the promise is fulfilled or unfulfilled. Even if the “I do” is said in the appropriate social context of a wedding, I would contend that while the utterance comes in the form of a promise, the utterance of that promise need not be a performative utterance in the way that Austin had imagined. In this essay, I use arguments from David Hume and Elizabeth Anscombe to show that promises fail to live up to performative utterances as JL Austin had conceived them and that, therefore, promises are not speech-acts.
Keywords: promises, future obligations, performative utterances