An Update Semantics for Promises and Other Obligation-Creating Speech Acts: A Promising Start
Aadil Hanif Kurji

Abstract:
This thesis is concerned with developing an update semantics to model
the speech act of promising, under various philosophical frameworks.
There are two main families of promissory framework, conventional and
expectational, we offer a hybrid account which makes up for the
deficiencies found with both. We also discuss promises in relation to
other obligation-creating speech acts to derive a set of desiderata
for the formalization. Promises are speech acts which have specific
illocutionary and perlocutionary effects which directly map to the
deontic and doxastic changes that occur to agents after a promise is
successfully made.

Update Semantics is a formal framework with the slogan "You know the
meaning of a sentence if you know the conditions under which it is
true". The presented approach, Promissory Update Semantics (PUS)
extends this to a multi-agent, doxastic, and deontic setting, in the
style of Dynamic Epistemic Logic. A series of promissory puzzles,
which exemplify the differences between the promissory frameworks, are
formalised and discussed in this dynamic setting.