Inner Speech: New Voices

Much of what we say is never said aloud. It occurs only silently, as inner speech. We chastise, congratulate, joke, and generate endless commentary, all without making a sound. This distinctively human ability to create public language in the privacy of our own minds-to, in a sense, "hear" ourselves talking when no one else can-is no less remarkable for its familiarity. And yet, until recently, inner speech remained at the periphery of philosophical and psychological theorizing. This volume, comprised of chapters written by an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, displays the rapidly growing interest among researchers in the puzzles surrounding the nature and cognitive role of the inner voice. Questions explored include: the aids and obstacles inner speech presents to self-knowledge; the complex relation it bears to overt speech production and perception; the means by which inner speech can be identified and empirically assessed; its role in generating auditory verbal hallucinations; and its relationship to conceptual thought itself.

Table of Contents:
0: Peter Langland-Hassan and Agustin Vicente: Introduction Part I: The Nature of Inner Speech 1: Peter Carruthers: The causes and contents of inner speech 2: Christopher Gauker: Inner speech as the internalization of outer speech 3: Peter Langland-Hassan: From introspection to essence: the auditory nature of inner speech 4: Sharon Geva: Inner speech and mental imagery: a neuroscientific perspective 5: Hélène Loevenbruck, R. Grandchamp, L. Rapin, L. Nalborczyk, M. Dohen, P. Perrier, M. Baciu, and Marcela Perrone-Bortolotti: A neurocognitive model of inner language: to predict, to hear, to see and to feel 6: Russell Hurlburt and Christopher Heavey: Inner speaking as pristine inner experience Part II: Inner Speech, Self-Reflection, and Self-Knowledge 7: José Luis Bermúdez: Inner speech, determinacy, and thinking consciously about thoughts 8: Keith Frankish: Inner speech and outer thought 9: Sam Wilkinson and Charles Fernyhough: When inner speech misleads 10: Edouard Machery: Know thyself: beliefs vs. desires in inner speech 11: Alain Morin: The self-reflective function of inner speech: thirteen years later 12: Lauren Swiney: Activity, agency, and inner speech pathology

About the Author :
Peter Langland-Hassan is a philosopher of mind and cognitive science at the University of Cincinnati. He has published widely on topics including imagination, inner speech, aphasia, metacognition, and self-knowledge. Langland-Hassan was a postdoctoral researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology (PNP) program, and holds degrees in philosophy from Columbia University and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Agustín Vicente is a philosopher of psychology and of language, and is Research Professor for the Ikerbasque Foundation for Science at the University of the Basque Country. He writes, often in collaboration, on semantics and pragmatics, language and thought, and physicalism and naturalism. He has published more than fifty papers in prestigious philosophy and linguistics venues.

Review :
a comprehensive, diverse and timely treatment of inner speech, the phenomenon of "the little voice in the head"... The book offers an in-depth treatment of the phenomenon from both theoretical and empirical approaches and thus provides a unique platform to contrast and evaluate the various approaches. Moreover, by directly engaging with inner speech, its contributors provide insights into the nature of thinking, consciousness, perception, action, self-knowledge and the self, thus presenting a network of interrelated topics for the study of the mind... an excellent collection of cutting-edge research on the philosophy, psychology and neuroscience of inner speech, a phenomenon that is key to many different cognitive processes. Carefully engaging with it will prove useful to students, professors, researchers and anyone interested in the nature of the mind. A uniquely broad coverage of its interesting topic; this text will appeal to students and scholars of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology ... Recommended.