• DOI:10.1007/S13164-015-0267-Y
• Corpus ID: 15028459

Thinking, Inner Speech, and Self-Awareness

@article{Roessler2016ThinkingIS,
  title={Thinking, Inner Speech, and Self-Awareness},
  author={Johannes Roessler},
  journal={Review of Philosophy and Psychology},
  year={2016},
  volume={7},
  pages={541-557}
}

• J. Roessler
• Published 1 September 2016
• Philosophy
• Review of Philosophy and Psychology

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.