 Searle, taking up the speech-act framework pioneered by J. L. Austin—similarly makes promises out to be a particular form of speech act—(see Searle 1963, 1965, 1965, 1979) a non-verbal action affected by speech, of a piece with “ordering” and “agreeing”. Searle, like Austin, is a paradigmatic conventionalist his work has been widely influential, and has helped to grow the literature on both promises and speech act theory (cf. Searle et al. 1980, inter alia)