»Wie soll ich tante Emma umbringen?«. Überlegungen zum Ratgeben als Institut

Abstract

How can the logic of advising be described adequately? At first, this article reconsiders an elder approach by Götz Hindelang, based upon the speech act theory. Since John Searle only considered the speech act of advising itself, Hindelang is right to point out that advising in its regular form implies an asking for an advice. But in distinguishing and constructing different patterns or types of asking for an advice he misses the point because he presupposes that the advice must be accepted as a good advise according to the value system of the questioner. This is contradictory to the nature of counsel pointed out by Thomas Hobbes that »to ask counsel of another is to permit him to give such counsel as he shall think best«. At second, some studies in the field of conversational analysis concerning counselling are discussed. Here, the empirical method requires naturally-occuring talk as database. But the conversations considered and analysed in the studies exclusively consist of institutional-framed counselling interviews where the assignment of roles is already fixed in the beginning. It is pointed out that conversation analysis is not sufficient to reconstruct the logic of advising as an institute itself with the specific obligations of its participants.