Apologies as Social Act a Phenomenological Inquiry

This work takes on an analysis of apologies through the lens of Reinach’s phenomenology of social acts. This approach contributes to enlightening several basic traits of apologies often overlooked by more common investigations of apologetic discourse according to speech acts theory. After a concise introduction devoted to Reinach’s idea of “social acts”, this essay brings to light a poorly explored Reinachian classification distinguishing simple and complex social acts: while simple social acts are social acts whose success is merely determined by the recipient’s perception, complex social acts are social acts whose success is determined by the recipient’s compliance with what the social act asked for (the expected result of the social act). Then, this work goes on to explore the nature of apologies as complex social acts, firstly identifying their main effect in the production of a corroborated factual record shared by the apologizer and the recipient of apologies; secondly, distinguishing two expected results of apologies: forgiveness and acceptance of apologies, often (mis)treated as the same act in common experience and socio-linguistic analyses.