What Advice Is

Philosophers have envisioned quite different characteristic purposes—or illocutionary points—for advising. Some see advice as a way of getting a person to do something, others see it as a way of getting a person to think about something. This chapter explains the significance of advice’s illocutionary point for the ethics of advising and explores the contrasting accounts offered by J. L. Austin, John Searle, Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla, and Stephen Darwall. It then presents a new account of the illocutionary point of advice as a form of help with practical reasoning. Advice is analysed not as a member of a broader illocutionary class, but as a distinctive practice with essentially connected illocutionary and relational components. Searle’s dimensions of illocutionary force provide a framework for explicating what is required for a speech act to be received as an act of advice.