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Austin

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Understanding forgiveness requires discovering what one d... — Carmelics

Home/Forgiveness & Mercy

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Understanding forgiveness requires discovering what one does when one performs the linguistic act of expressing forgiveness, typically by way of the utterance 'I forgive you'.

Forgiveness & Mercy

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The question 'What is forgiveness?' is best answered in the context of what speakers mean when they employ the term.
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1.Forgiveness is fundamentally a psychological process of releasing resentment, which can occur without any linguistic expression whatsoever.
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2.Bishop Butler and subsequent psychologists locate forgiveness in the transformation of affective states, not in speech acts.
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3.Privileging the utterance 'I forgive you' confuses the outward declaration of forgiveness with its constitutive emotional and moral reality.
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Reason against 2 of 2

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1.Austin's speech act theory, which grounds linguistic act analysis, distinguishes performatives from descriptions but cannot settle what forgiveness essentially is.
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2.Jeffrie Murphy argues that genuine forgiveness requires overcoming resentment on moral grounds, a condition no utterance alone can satisfy or reveal.
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Forgiveness & Mercy

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Austin's speech act theory, which grounds linguistic act analysis, distinguishes...Bishop Butler and subsequent psychologists locate forgiveness in the transformat...Forgiveness is fundamentally a psychological process of releasing resentment, wh...Jeffrie Murphy argues that genuine forgiveness requires overcoming resentment on...

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Privileging the utterance 'I forgive you' confuses the outward declaration of fo...The question 'What is forgiveness?' is best answered in the context of what spea...

Similar

The utterance 'I forgive you', understood as a declarative, makes it t...89%The question 'What is forgiveness?' is best answered in the context of...87%Cognate communicative acts, gestures, and facial expressions may achie...86%It may be that sometimes "I forgive you" functions only as a behabitiv...86%

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The views of forgiveness canvassed thus far have, by and large, focused on forgiveness as a private phenomenon, involving, for example, a change in emotion. But another strand of thinking attends to our social and linguistic practices related to forgiveness, most notably, our practice of saying “I forgive you” or some cognate expression. Joram Haber argued that the question “What is forgiveness?” is best answered, “in the context of what speakers mean when they employ the term” (1991: 53), even if there are other ways to forgive besides uttering “‘I forgive you’” (1991: 40). According to Haber...

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 3 (1 for, 2 against)
Edits: 1 edit