That language use is sometimes misleading is no discovery the language analysis has made; we could experience it every day if we only wondered where we have arrived because we relied on words - combined words and single ones, too. The latter often collide with other ones if we think it over.
Public language use is replete with that semantic veil; usually they serve to turn a controversial or clearly negative matter into a positive one, to charge it positive, so to speak. As upvaluing its function is its term 'euphemism'. But since this is widely known, the critical achievement is not too sensational here. These euphemistic words are at best faded, 'dead', that is detected euphemisms. Everybody knows, after all, making redundant means firing, impression management means deception, élite means a dilettante with an effective directory. Whatever can be verbally expressed is dubious.
But there are less clear, more subtle instances. An especially precarious example is the expression of a verbal action politicians apply in an election campaign: the campaign promise. On condition we practice charity, we do not make do with tritely translating it into the term 'lie' but have a closer analytical look.
An election promise denotes (when we start from the intellectual bottom) making a promise in a campaign. Let us ask ourselves if it is really about a promise simply defined in an attributive way by the utterance conditions - or if the so-called promise is predicatively characterized to such an extent that we even cannot talk about a promise at all. That is, if case 1 is correct, an election promise will be a promise; if case 2 is right, then it will not. In that case the utterance conditions inhibit the action from coming into effect.
To clarify the issue we must have a clear conception of what a promise is. Or, speaking in a critical way: What do we mean by using the word 'promise'? Intuition alone implies the following four examples do not comprise four promises:
I'm going to spank you, I can promise.
Do not worry, the tempest won't damage this house, I promise.
But we will go to the cinema tonight, I promise.
But I promise you to quit smoking.
As we can see, simply labelling a speech action a promise will not suffice to actually make it such. Rather there are different utterance types; they might have things in common, but these aspects are not sufficient to make them identical. Wittgenstein called this phenomenon the family resemblances of language games. For instance, both a threat and a promise refer content-wise to the utterer's future action which might affect the interlocutor. In that respect they resemble each other - but the threat announces a negative, the promise a positive action. Consequently even childern can very reliably tell the one thing from the other. Furthermore, as for a future beneficial state, a promise is similar to (but not identical with!) a positive forecast or a prophecy - but the latter's contents are beyond the utterer's influence. It is impossible to promise one day we will exploit the environment on the Mars instead on the Earth - even if the NASA is covering up that crucial difference out of financial motives. As difficult it is to tell a forecast from a prophecy, as easy by comparison it is to distinguish them from the promise. The difference criterion lies whether an utterer's action is at stake. Moreover we can separate promise from commitment. Both refer to the utterer's future action, but in the latter case the action is irrelevant to the interlocutor. If my neighbour informs me he is going to take care of his health, this will not really interest me; but if he is in debt with me, I can quite understand his utterance to be a promise.
Thus steeled we can now turn to the election promise. What is it about? A candidate's announcing a future action for the voters' sake? If so, we can be correct in talking about a promise. However, a broken promise is a very serious breach of trust. This is because confidence as a 'risky advance' (Luhmann) can be withdrawn very easily. One single case of misuse is often sufficient to pigeonhole the promise breaker one and for all as a liar and avoid further contact. So will be candidates liars if they do not keep their promise? The opposition which has lost the election due to the promise will always say they are; it is to scrutinize the emptiness of the victor's promise. This does not only apply to the present chancellor, as his predecessors can testify; take for instance the 1970's 'pension lie', the 1990's 'flourishing East German regions'. Still at least in Germany it happens quite rarely a chancellor will be immediately voted out of office for breach of trust and false promises.
This is because a promise does not only require the utterer's sincerity, but also his situational competence to put it into practice. Exactly here lies the politican's loophole; his utterance is meant to exert the utmost dramatic effect, so it has to be correspondingly comprising. And a comprising announcement again implies high complexity. It goes beyond a single person's intellectual capacity (and that kind of person need not be a candidate, even though it might help). The more complex the entanglement, the more irritable its sensitive machinery will be. The system of announcement walks into its own trap, so to speak. The trap is called 'tight causal coupling'. E.g. we can establish an overall network of arrangements, organize the purchase of food, spirits, sign on babysitters, professional entertainers, reservation of restaurant rooms, CD players, CDs and many more - but a puncture, a coughing child in the kindergarten, a polite superior's direction, an operating system error - these events can jeopardize, if not thwart the promise to arrange a party. Of course, great politics has set higher standards: faults of global economy, mentality problems force the candidate to redefine the given promise as a simple announcement. To put it differently: Campaigns lack a communication aspect which will be handed in later: the conditional IF.
Given that, it is hard to talk about a 'real' campaign promise. A serious candidate could only claim he will not achieve X but he will (want to?) try to do so. But nobody would like to say or hear that. In contrast, a family-resembling justification is to replace the notoriously vague X with a far more modest x'. Instead of - pardon: as full employment one Euro jobs.
But beside this interior condition there is an exterior, too which characterizes campaign promises: the immediate temporal, even causal connection between the announcement and the expected return. For every promise implies a favour which can under the appropriate conditions demand its pay off in an unconstrained way. It does not matter if one is aiming at it when promising a favour. The return demand will latently exist. And in the case of campaign promises the pay off is implied from the start: voting in favour of the utterer.
Which draws our attention to another, maybe the crucial aspect; the negotiation situation in which the campaign promise is made. It works along the quid pro quo principle. Without vote no promise. For that reason, the campaign promise is not a promise in the first place (which means it is not identical), but an argument in favour of voting for a candidate. But arguments belong to a class of speech actions wholly different from promises - the more or less sound statements.
All in all the term campaign promise refers not to the identity, but to the family resemblance utterances of that kind have with promises.
Public language use is replete with that semantic veil; usually they serve to turn a controversial or clearly negative matter into a positive one, to charge it positive, so to speak. As upvaluing its function is its term 'euphemism'. But since this is widely known, the critical achievement is not too sensational here. These euphemistic words are at best faded, 'dead', that is detected euphemisms. Everybody knows, after all, making redundant means firing, impression management means deception, élite means a dilettante with an effective directory. Whatever can be verbally expressed is dubious.
But there are less clear, more subtle instances. An especially precarious example is the expression of a verbal action politicians apply in an election campaign: the campaign promise. On condition we practice charity, we do not make do with tritely translating it into the term 'lie' but have a closer analytical look.
An election promise denotes (when we start from the intellectual bottom) making a promise in a campaign. Let us ask ourselves if it is really about a promise simply defined in an attributive way by the utterance conditions - or if the so-called promise is predicatively characterized to such an extent that we even cannot talk about a promise at all. That is, if case 1 is correct, an election promise will be a promise; if case 2 is right, then it will not. In that case the utterance conditions inhibit the action from coming into effect.
To clarify the issue we must have a clear conception of what a promise is. Or, speaking in a critical way: What do we mean by using the word 'promise'? Intuition alone implies the following four examples do not comprise four promises:
I'm going to spank you, I can promise.
Do not worry, the tempest won't damage this house, I promise.
But we will go to the cinema tonight, I promise.
But I promise you to quit smoking.
As we can see, simply labelling a speech action a promise will not suffice to actually make it such. Rather there are different utterance types; they might have things in common, but these aspects are not sufficient to make them identical. Wittgenstein called this phenomenon the family resemblances of language games. For instance, both a threat and a promise refer content-wise to the utterer's future action which might affect the interlocutor. In that respect they resemble each other - but the threat announces a negative, the promise a positive action. Consequently even childern can very reliably tell the one thing from the other. Furthermore, as for a future beneficial state, a promise is similar to (but not identical with!) a positive forecast or a prophecy - but the latter's contents are beyond the utterer's influence. It is impossible to promise one day we will exploit the environment on the Mars instead on the Earth - even if the NASA is covering up that crucial difference out of financial motives. As difficult it is to tell a forecast from a prophecy, as easy by comparison it is to distinguish them from the promise. The difference criterion lies whether an utterer's action is at stake. Moreover we can separate promise from commitment. Both refer to the utterer's future action, but in the latter case the action is irrelevant to the interlocutor. If my neighbour informs me he is going to take care of his health, this will not really interest me; but if he is in debt with me, I can quite understand his utterance to be a promise.
Thus steeled we can now turn to the election promise. What is it about? A candidate's announcing a future action for the voters' sake? If so, we can be correct in talking about a promise. However, a broken promise is a very serious breach of trust. This is because confidence as a 'risky advance' (Luhmann) can be withdrawn very easily. One single case of misuse is often sufficient to pigeonhole the promise breaker one and for all as a liar and avoid further contact. So will be candidates liars if they do not keep their promise? The opposition which has lost the election due to the promise will always say they are; it is to scrutinize the emptiness of the victor's promise. This does not only apply to the present chancellor, as his predecessors can testify; take for instance the 1970's 'pension lie', the 1990's 'flourishing East German regions'. Still at least in Germany it happens quite rarely a chancellor will be immediately voted out of office for breach of trust and false promises.
This is because a promise does not only require the utterer's sincerity, but also his situational competence to put it into practice. Exactly here lies the politican's loophole; his utterance is meant to exert the utmost dramatic effect, so it has to be correspondingly comprising. And a comprising announcement again implies high complexity. It goes beyond a single person's intellectual capacity (and that kind of person need not be a candidate, even though it might help). The more complex the entanglement, the more irritable its sensitive machinery will be. The system of announcement walks into its own trap, so to speak. The trap is called 'tight causal coupling'. E.g. we can establish an overall network of arrangements, organize the purchase of food, spirits, sign on babysitters, professional entertainers, reservation of restaurant rooms, CD players, CDs and many more - but a puncture, a coughing child in the kindergarten, a polite superior's direction, an operating system error - these events can jeopardize, if not thwart the promise to arrange a party. Of course, great politics has set higher standards: faults of global economy, mentality problems force the candidate to redefine the given promise as a simple announcement. To put it differently: Campaigns lack a communication aspect which will be handed in later: the conditional IF.
Given that, it is hard to talk about a 'real' campaign promise. A serious candidate could only claim he will not achieve X but he will (want to?) try to do so. But nobody would like to say or hear that. In contrast, a family-resembling justification is to replace the notoriously vague X with a far more modest x'. Instead of - pardon: as full employment one Euro jobs.
But beside this interior condition there is an exterior, too which characterizes campaign promises: the immediate temporal, even causal connection between the announcement and the expected return. For every promise implies a favour which can under the appropriate conditions demand its pay off in an unconstrained way. It does not matter if one is aiming at it when promising a favour. The return demand will latently exist. And in the case of campaign promises the pay off is implied from the start: voting in favour of the utterer.
Which draws our attention to another, maybe the crucial aspect; the negotiation situation in which the campaign promise is made. It works along the quid pro quo principle. Without vote no promise. For that reason, the campaign promise is not a promise in the first place (which means it is not identical), but an argument in favour of voting for a candidate. But arguments belong to a class of speech actions wholly different from promises - the more or less sound statements.
All in all the term campaign promise refers not to the identity, but to the family resemblance utterances of that kind have with promises.
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