Promises as Proposals in Joint Practical Deliberation

Joint practical deliberation is the activity of deciding together what to do.1 When two colleagues discuss where to meet for coffee, when two partners have a conversation about whether to have a second child, when friends on a road trip argue about whether to take the scenic route or the freeway, they are engaged in joint practical deliberation. They are trying to arrive at a single plan of action that expresses and governs both of their wills. This paper begins from two basic observations about this activity. First, we can make joint decisions regarding not just what we will do, but also what you will do or what I will do. For example: if we are deliberating together about how to write a coauthored paper, we might jointly decide that I will write the introduction, leaving it quite open what you will do. Second, if we do in fact deliberate together, we must have some speech acts by means of which we propose potential joint decisions, putting them forward for joint consideration. Combining these two ideas, we can infer that there are speech acts the force of which is to propose joint decisions regarding what you will do or what I will do. If we investigate what such speech acts would look like, they are surprisingly similar to speech acts we already have: requests, demands, offers, and promises. This suggests a hypothesis: these speech acts just are proposals within joint practical deliberation. Requests and demands are two ways of proposing joint decisions about what you will do; offers and promises are two ways of proposing joint decisions about what I will do. In this paper, I defend one part of this hypothesis: the claim that promises are proposals to make joint decisions about what the speaker will do.