Thinking through talking to yourself: Inner speech as a vehicle of conscious reasoning

Munroe, Wade

doi:10.1080/09515089.2022.2042505

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…27 My view entails that a covert articulation of an expression, E, in working memory can flexibly function as either a representation of E or an internal use of E. It's beyond the scope of this paper to discuss how this flexible functioning occurs. See (Munroe, 2022). However, my position is not the only one that entails that representations in working memory can play flexible functional roles.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Semiotics in the head: Thinking about and thinking through symbols

Munroe

2022

Philos Phenomenol Research

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Our conscious thought, at least at times, seems suffused with language. We may experience thinking as if we were ‘talking in our head’, thus using inner speech to verbalize, e.g., our premises, lemmas, and conclusions. I take inner speech to be part of a larger phenomenon I call inner semiotics, where inner semiotics involves the subjective experience of expressions in a semiotic (or symbol) system absent the overt articulation of the expressions. In this paper, I argue that inner semiotics allows us to bootstrap our way into entertaining thoughts about exact numbers and quantities that we couldn't prior to our competence with a numeric code. I establish that our arithmetic thoughts literally occur as (internal ‘articulations’ of) expressions in a numeric code. However, a problem arises for my view: just as we can slip in overt speech, producing an utterance that deviates from what we mean to say, there is very good evidence that we can slip in inner speech as well. If our arithmetic thought occurs in a numeric code, it's far from clear how we determine when a covert utterance constitutes a slip. In closing, I provide an account of what makes an inner speech utterance a slip.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Semiotics in the head: Thinking about and thinking through symbols

Munroe

2022

Philos Phenomenol Research

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“…The argument I provide in this section is a truncated version of an argument I've developed over several papers. For a more in-depth defense of the claims in this section see(Munroe 2022;2023a;2023b).…”

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confidence: 99%

What’s So Special About Reasoning? Rationality, Belief Updating, and Internalism

Munroe

2024

Ergo an Open Access Journal of Philosophy

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In updating our beliefs on the basis of our background attitudes and evidence we frequently employ objects in our environment to represent pertinent information. For example, we may write our premises and lemmas on a whiteboard to aid in a proof or move the beads of an abacus to assist in a calculation. In both cases, we generate extramental (that is, occurring outside of the mind) representational states, and, at least in the case of the abacus, we operate over these states in light of their contents (e.g., the integers represented by the beads) to generate new representations. In this paper, I argue that our belief updating processes and the grounds of their rational evaluation are partly constituted by extramental representations and operations. In other words, we don’t merely update our attitudes through an internal process of reasoning on the basis of available evidence. If we are to accurately understand and rationally evaluate our belief updating processes and resultant attitudes, we need to examine how we representationally appropriate our extramental environment in the updating process.

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What it takes to make a word (token)

Munroe

2022

Synthese

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Thinking through talking to yourself: Inner speech as a vehicle of conscious reasoning

Cited by 6 publications

References 80 publications

Semiotics in the head: Thinking about and thinking through symbols

Semiotics in the head: Thinking about and thinking through symbols

What’s So Special About Reasoning? Rationality, Belief Updating, and Internalism

What it takes to make a word (token)

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