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The Predictive, the Normative, the Volitional, the Promissory

The distinct ways of saying something about the future, or about possible futures, such as:

Predictive: The stone which I threw in the air will fall to earth.
Normative: No one should be a slave. One should not {steal, eat pork, have sex with ones sister/brother}.
Volitional/Promissory:
I suspect the old phrase "I shall" was a way of indicating that "I" statements are inherently different from statements about third persons, or about things; in particularly, they are, or were, expected to be volitional rather than predictive; at least they could be. To the extent one makes non-volitional statements about ones own future, one will seem passive, or fatalistic, or like one who expects the world to take care of him or her -- To take two rather opposite sounding examples: "I'll be dead before I'm 21", or "My parents will see that I get into Harvard". Some examples of volitional/promissory statements about oneself:

I will be a millionaire by the age of 30.
I shall/will return the $1,000 with interest on or before March 1, 1999.

These are, I maintain, among the most powerful linguistic distinctions that can be made.
Most of us, though, hardly ever think about them; hardly ever think "OK, I wasn't promising that -- that was just a prediction", nor do we wield these distinctions well intuitively.
(What is it to "wield a distinction well intuitively"? An analogy is that on a bicycle, one makes distinctions between the feelings associated with tilting to the right or to the left, and acts upon those distinctions without any conscious thought.)

Note: There is a lot of use of the first person in this essay -- "I this-or-that", and such. I don't think this is due to narcissism, but just to the fact that this essay is

self. So I will speak of

self, and if I succeed in conveying the experience, you may get a vicarious experience of

self and how you "deal with" yourself.

Illustrations of the muddle we are in with respect to the normative (or volitional)/predictive distinction.

We lose touch with the sense of ourselves as volitional beings, and become helpless observers of an internal "war of desires".
"Social Darwinism" -- Charles Darwin proposed a certain generalization ("natural selection") about how nature operates. This was a predictive statement, as scientific statement, in general, are -- one way we do often wield the distinctions intuitively is that if we hear a normative statement made in a scientific context, it sounds inappropriate. Social "Darwinists", however, turned the predictive statement into the normative idea that the "fittest" should survive, and for the most part, I think they were quite unaware of their verbal jugglery. Certainly Darwin never said that evolution is how things should operate, and that we are under some sort of obligation to ensure that the civilized world promote natural selection just as life in the unmodified scene of nature did.
The "power of positive thinking" is, I think, a way of playing a trick on ourselves. When people have a weak sense of every way of speaking about the future except the predictive (or they delegate volitional or normative speaking to a boss, and/or institutions...), the positive thinking coach says to believe (or predict) that "positive" things are going to happen, and the mind that has lost its ability to make these distinctions reacts more or less as if one had made promised or willed or intended it.
The tendency to say "such-and-such" should happen but actually not mean "should" at all, but rather, "I expect such-and-such to happen" (but then you make yourself very visible as the predictor, and people tend to avoid that).

Reasons for the muddle:

(timeless, or as old as humanity) A primary way in which norms pass from one generation to the next is this: The developing individual observes how things are done around him or her, and unconsciously forms the idea that this is how things should be done. This is being a role-player -- the role (hint of something paradoxical here) towards which most people gravitate. The opposite tendency is to be an original, or a creator, -- to critique or largely ignore, or just steer away from, "the way things are done". This class includes leaders. Merely getting others to do things is not what I mean by leading; middle managers, for example, are at least as likely as anyone to take the reality around them as what should be.
(peculiar to our time) From too much emphasis on the objective, or scientific, or "instrumental" -- how to manipulate dead, or passive, matter, we forget the distinction of self. We often lose "will power" -- which might be viewed as the skill of "knack" of self-transformation.

"Will Power"

This (situation of seeming helplessness) is where someone might say "nonsense -- use your will power". It is where a good motivational "coach" might somehow inject me with will power. This will generally involve telling me things I "already know" in an "inspiring" way.

What is that all about? Coaches, sales motivators, and military officers think about it all the time, as do preachers (or evangelical preachers at least?). A huge portion of their job is to "be inspiring" -- to transform the weak willed into the strong willed.

To many, and I'd guess most, of us, "will power" is elusive -- at least in some situations. For me, sometimes, wishing I had more "will power" is like having known at one time, how to wiggle my ears, but having lost the knack, and looking in the mirror, thinking about wiggling my ears -- trying to will them to wiggle, but seeing nothing happen.

Some days I make a promise, and it is a promise. It shifts my being. I keep envisioning the outcome that I promised or willed to come about, and I jump out of bed in the morning excited about doing whatever it takes to produce that outcome. At its purest, a promise isn't about a particular set of actions I will perform. Living in a promise, in its purest form, I don't know how to make it come true, but I keep coming up with new ways of doing things. It often seems like unexpected means and opportunities just "crop up".

Some days I say I will do something, and it is not a promise, but just a prediction, or some wavering hybrid of a promise and a prediction. At worst, my listening to myself may be like "yeah, right". I'm sure many people experience this when they say they are going to stick to a certain diet, or stop smoking. Sometimes I say I will do something, not in total bad faith, but I leave myself an unspoken "out", like "if I doesn't run into too many obstacles", or "I'll be there at 10:00 (unspoken: if the traffic isn't too bad)". Sometimes I am betting on myself or betting against myself, like, "I think I'm going to do it this time", or "I have this sinking feeling like I'm going to let myself down".

To observe, and make predictions about, oneself is to exit the domain in which promises live.