On representation schemes for promising electronically

摘要

This paper proposes and discusses a series of representational techniques for expressing promises in first-order logic. It is argued that the proposed representations have properties that cohere well with our pre-theoretic concept of promising, including creation of intensional contexts. Also, representations of promises in other formal languages, and inferences with them, may be validated by translating the expressions into the first-order formalism proposed here. Finally, a brief discussion is given to indicate that the proposed representational techniques may be applied generally to other illocutionary forces (or propositional attitudes).