Thinking , Inner Speech , and Self - Awareness

This paper has two themes. One is the question of how to understand the relation between inner speech and knowledge of one’s own thoughts. My aim here is to probe and challenge the popular neo-Rylean suggestion that we know our own thoughts by ‘overhearing our own silent monologues’, and to sketch an alternative suggestion, inspired by Ryle’s lesser-known discussion of thinking as a ‘serial operation’. The second theme is the question whether, as Ryle apparently thought, we need two different accounts of the epistemology of thinking, corresponding to the distinction between thoughts with respect to which we are active vs passive. I suggest we should be skeptical about the assumption that there is a single distinction here. There are a number of interesting ways in which thinking can involve passivity, but they provide no support for a ‘bifurcationist’ approach to the epistemology of thinking. A number of authors have recently advocated what might be called a neo-Rylean account of the way we know our own thoughts. The suggestion they elaborate and defend is that we know what we think by ‘overhearing’, or ‘eavesdropping on’, ‘our own (..) silent monologues.’ (Ryle 1949: 176). Yet Ryle left us not one but two accounts of the way we know our thoughts. The passages that have provided the inspiration for neo-Rylean work are to be found in section 5 of chapter VI of The Concept of Mind, entitled ‘Disclosure by Unstudied Talk’. Ryle pursues an apparently quite different suggestion in the preceding section, entitled ‘Self-knowledge without privileged access’. The idea here is that there is a distinctive sense in which a person engaged in a ‘serial operation’ is ‘alive to’, and knows, what he is doing, and that a person can be said to know, in that sense, what he is ‘at this moment (..) thinking’. (1949: 166, 171) We know our thoughts, on this account (which I’ll call Ryle’s first account), insofar as thinking can be an example of a ‘serial operation’. We know our thoughts, on the second, more familiar account, by ‘overhearing’ our own inner speech. Rev.Phil.Psych. DOI 10.1007/s13164-015-0267-y Langland-Hassan 2008; Byrne 2011; Cassam 2011. * Johannes Roessler [email protected] 1 Warwick University, Coventry, UK Author's personal copy