Why are you talking to yourself? The epistemic role of inner speech in reasoning

Abstract

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 conclusionsit 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

Varieties of Inner Speech and Creative Potential

“…That said, an aptitude for these cognitive abilities has been argued to be modality independent (e.g., predicting performance on verbal, spatial, and numeric cognitive ability tests) (Cattell, 1987), and likely involves inner speaking regardless (cf. Munroe, 2021). The short form is an economic version of the full Hagen Matrices Test and can be used for non-clinical purposes (Heydasch et al, 2013(Heydasch et al, , 2020.…”

Does the corollary discharge provide the sensory content of inner speech? A preregistered direct replication and extension of Scott (2013)

“…The results from Scott (2013) considerably impacted various bodies of literature, including inner speech (e.g., Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015;Jack et al, 2019;Loevenbruck et al, 2018;Whitford et al, 2017), working memory (e.g., Buchsbaum & D'Esposito, 2019;Ylinen et al, 2015), or the general cognitive science's literature (e.g., Morsella et al, 2016;Munroe, 2022), taken as evidence in favour of the involvement of the motor system during inner speech production. However, that Scott (2013) used 'enacted inner speech' (i.e., silent speech) rather than actual inner speech has often been missed by following work.…”

Inner Speaking and Uncertainty during Idea Generation

“…These self-regulatory functions of inner speaking can adaptively or maladaptively affect how people think and act (Fernyhough, 2016). Empirical studies have broadly focused on the relationships of self-regulatory inner speaking with executive functions, learning, and reasoning (e.g., Munroe, 2022;Wallace, Peng, & Williams, 2017), sports motivation and performance (e.g., Fritsch, Feil, Jekauc, Latinjak, & Hatzigeorgiadis, 2022;McCormick, Meijen, Anstiss, & Jones, 2019), and mental wellbeing (e.g., Hirsch, Perman, Hayes, Eagleson, & Mathews, 2015). While the relationship between creativity and inner speech appears to be understudied, research using experience sampling methods suggest that inner speaking occurs in daily life during activities that are closely related to, or can form part of, the creative thinking process (Morin et al, 2011(Morin et al, , 2018.…”