Promises, the present and “now.” Lessons from Austin, Prior and Kamp

In this paper, I discuss explicit performative sentences and, in particular, those containing the explicit performative verb “to promise.” I argue that one of the key features of explicit performative verbs is their utterance-reflexive character. In a minimal context, an utterance like “I promise I will finish the paper” can be taken either as an explicit performative utterance, a promise, or as an assertion, which does not constitute a promise but a report of one. An utterance like “I promise now I will finish the paper,” however, in a minimal context, should be taken as an explicit performative. To explain this, I use Prior and Kamp's work on “now” (Prior, 1968; Kamp, 1971) and Korta and Perry's content pluralism (Korta and Perry, 2011). I defend that the role “now” plays when embedded in a performative sentence is consistent with the role it plays when embedded in a temporal operator. In both cases, the role of “now” is to reflexively point to the time of utterance and in neither case is the “now” redundant.