Concepts versus Territories

What counts as forgiveness? Suppose that a person says that she forgives you but she clearly feels great hostility to you. Is she misusing the word? Suppose that a word in some text from another civilization is translated as “forgiveness” although the text describes the execution of “forgiven” people. Is this a mistranslation? One way to approach such questions would be to make a theory of forgiveness, laying out the conditions that have to be met for one person to forgive another. Then, if a person or a text uses a word in a way that violates these conditions, we would take it that forgiveness is not really the topic.

That is the procedure suggested by standard analytical philosophy. It is well suited for debunking, and there is always a lot of bunk around. But, for all its attractiveness, I think it is not the best approach here, for two reasons.