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Now, if we were going to take seriously the idea that performatives work by way of being statements to the effect that one performs a certain speech act, we would have to show how the characteristics of such self-referential statements were sufficient to be constitutive of the performance of the speech act named by the performative verb. In the formal mode we could say that we need to show how (assuming certain contextual conditions are satisfied) the statement: "John made a self-referential statement to the effect that his utterance was a promise that p" entails, as a matter of logic, "John made a promise that p." (Searle 1989, 544)