Why are you talking to yourself? The epistemic role of inner speech in reasoning.
People frequently report that, at times, their thought has a vocal character. Thinking commonly appears to be accompanied or constituted by silently 'talking' to oneself in inner speech. In this paper, we explore the specifically epistemic role of inner speech in conscious reasoning. A plausible pos...
| Published in: | Nous (0029-4624) Vol. 56; no. 4; pp. 841 - 867 |
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| Format: | Article |
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Wiley-Blackwell
Dec2022
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=160571454&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 160571454 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00294624 D97 jtl: Nous (0029-4624) issn: 00294624 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Dec2022 vid: 56 iid: 4 pid: 480 pub: Wiley-Blackwell artinfo: ui: 160571454 10.1111/nous.12385 ppf: 841 ppct: 26 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 280KB tig: atl: Why are you talking to yourself? The epistemic role of inner speech in reasoning. aug: au: Munroe, Wade affil: Department of Philosophy and the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science, University of Michigan su: Figures of speech Self-talk Speech Counterfactuals (Logic) sug: subj: Figures of speech Self-talk Speech Counterfactuals (Logic) ab: People frequently report that, at times, their thought has a vocal character. Thinking commonly appears to be accompanied or constituted by silently 'talking' to oneself in inner speech. In this paper, we explore the specifically epistemic role of inner speech in conscious reasoning. A plausible position—but one I argue is ultimately wrong—is that inner speech plays a solely facilitative role that is exhausted by (i) serving as the vehicle of representation for conscious reasoning, and/or (ii) allowing one to focus on certain types of objects or relations, e.g., causal relations, abstracta, counterfactuals, etc., or to consciously entertain structured propositional contents that it would be hard (or impossible) to focus on or entertain with representations in other (e.g., imagistic) formats. According to this position, inner speech doesn't figure as a justificatory element in our reasoning or as the partial epistemic basis of our conclusions—it merely facilitates reasoning through (i) and/or (ii). In contrast to the view that inner speech is a mere facilitator, I establish that (outside of potentially playing roles (i) and/or (ii)) the language we use itself serves as a crucial source of information in reasoning. In other words, we reason from propositions about the language we use in inner speech as opposed to exclusively reasoning from the semantic contents of the speech. My conclusion follows from how we use language as a cognitive tool to keep track of information, e.g., the contents of premises, lemmas, previous reasoning results, etc., in reasoning. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Copyright of Nous (0029-4624) is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. item: Nous (0029-4624) holder: Wiley-Blackwell dt: @attributes: year: 2022 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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