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Interesting. I’m not a philosopher myself, but I often find myself debating or in dialogue with someone mentally, preparing arguments…
If the producers of this list want more (nit-picky) feedback, I noticed descrepancies with some journals in philosophy of science.…
Thanks! Turns out I got fooled by AI detector, a company using the name “Pangram” for advertising. A check with…
Exactly right.
I have solved complex math problems without any ‘inner speech’. Having solved a problem, one may then translate the solution…
If so, provide a copy to Pangram’s CEO, who has offered a bounty for any long form text from before…
Hurlburt has a pretty cool answer to your question. You think that conscious thought requires ‘inner speech’. This is because…
That’s what psychology professor Russell Hurlburt claims in this interesting interview. Are his views about inner experience widely accepted?
I read something about this. It is related to aphantasia, which I have and which affects no more than 4 % of the population. The numbers surprise me but not the condition
Interested in what is known about this subject, so commenting here in order to receive your thoughts. Thanks, Brian
I haven’t listened to this interview, but Hurlburt’s usual claim in print is that people engage in inner speech around 20% of the time (or that participants in his experiments report engaging in inner speech on about 20% of the occasions when they are prompted to report their experience, or something very much like this), rather than that only 20% of people have inner speech.
Not having inner speech is known as anendophasia. Its incidence is similar to aphantasia.
Speaking as a linguist working in this area, Russell Hurlburt is very well known in the field as having pioneered methods for acquiring data about inner speech in a maximally non-intrusive way. So his views and numbers are certainly worth taking seriously.
Very interesting! Here’s what Hurlburt claims in the linked video:
Percentage of people who engage in ‘inner speech’ *occasionally*: ~ 95- 100% (26:32 in the linked video)
Percentage of people who engage in ‘inner speech’ *constantly* or *almost all the time*: ~5% (26:44)
Percentage of people who engage in ‘inner speech’ *fairly frequently*: ~20% (27:28)
What’s especially interesting is Hurlburt’s claim that there is a significant discrepancy between the percentage of people who ACTUALLY engage in inner speech ‘almost all the time’ and the percentage of people who REPORT BUT DO NOT ACTUALLY engage in inner speech ‘almost all the time.’
Can I ask a question which seems pertinent?
What does it mean to engage or not engage in inner speech? I associate inner speech with thinking and for me, not engaging in inner speech means not thinking. I’m aware that, for example, when I walk, my mind calculates where to put my foot and that could be seen as a form of thinking, where no inner speech is generally present. However, when I try to understand my now adult children, for example, I need to consciously think about them and that requires inner speech. Are there people who don’t do that, who rarely or never consciously think?
Hurlburt has a pretty cool answer to your question. You think that conscious thought requires ‘inner speech’. This is because whenever you ask yourself, ‘What was I just thinking?’ you enter what Hurlburt calls a ‘verbal mode,’ which naturally elicits a ‘verbal’ response (a linguistic description of the thought you were just having). Consequently, you mistakenly infer that the thought you were just having was the thought (now in words) that you just retrieved. But maybe it wasn’t ‘linguistic’ until you deliberately recalled it?
Suppose now that when pressed, you couldn’t really describe any details of the ‘inner speech’ (specific words used, tone of inner voice, etc.). Hurlburt takes this as evidence that there wasn’t *really* any inner speech until you asked yourself the question, ‘What am I thinking?’
Exactly right.
I have solved complex math problems without any ‘inner speech’. Having solved a problem, one may then translate the solution into ‘inner speech’ as a preamble to expressing the solution in actual speech. In general, quite a lot of complex problem-solving doesn’t go through ‘inner speech’, among other reasons because ‘inner speech’ is a slow activity – much slower than most ‘thought’.
For obvious reasons, I believe philosophers indulge in ‘inner speech’ much more than most people do, and I think that may bias their view of how ordinary people behave in ordinary situations. Perhaps some examples would be Socrates’ ‘daimon’, and Descartes’ extraordinary credulity about the meaning of certain subjective experiences when he is so radically sceptical about ‘external’ experience.
Interesting. I’m not a philosopher myself, but I often find myself debating or in dialogue with someone mentally, preparing arguments or comments, even if I never will personally talk with that person. From what you say, a lot of people don’t do that, which I had never realized previously. As a matter of fact, when I talk to myself, I’m talking to an imagined other, that is, another person or type of person. The fact that very few people do that is probably the reason that people look at you as weird when you’re walking down the street literally talking to yourself.
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