Understanding Promises from the Perspective of Argumentation: The Cases from Presidential Debates

Abstract

Promises in political context, especially through the notion of commitment and intention, have captivated researchers in the field of linguistics and philosophy of language and mind in recent times. In a political context, promises may have other purposes, for gaining supports, besides declaring the sincere intention to do a future action. The notion would potentially flout Austin’s felicity conditions and Gricean maxim of quality, hence, proposing more challenges in identifying promises through the concept of intentionalism. This article aims to address the challenges by proposing a theoretical model of argumentative commitment. 161 utterances from the speeches of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates who participated in the first to third rounds of the 2019 presidential election debates were used as data for further investigation. By using the 8 hypothetical conditions adapted from Searle’s 9 criteria of non-defective promise, a total of 50 argumentative commitments were extracted. Further analysis that was conducted confirmed that as a perlocutionary effect, the intention to commit in argumentative commitments is negotiable through the presence of other speech acts such as assertions, which were later called backings. Our findings then confirmed the presence of four kinds of backings, namely, assumptive, apprehensive, circumstantive, and resultative backings. From the findings, we argued that in a political context, promises, which are in the form of argumentative commitments, may consist of two elements, the commitment indicator and backings.