Inner Speech: New Voices

In the last 10 years, inner speech – the little voice in the head – has started to become established as a topic in the philosophy of psychology. The two philosophers who have contributed most to this development are Agustín Vicente1 and Peter Langland-Hassan. Together, they have now edited the first largely philosophical anthology on the topic, Inner Speech: New Voices.2 In the first sentence of their introduction, Vicente and Langland-Hassan write that, ‘[i]n another possible world, not far from our own, inner speech occupies center stage in contemporary philosophical psychology’ (1).3 After all, the phenomenon lies at the meeting point of ‘intersecting “big ticket” questions about thought, language and consciousness’ (2). An example they offer of one such question: does inner speech merely express thoughts, or is inner speech itself actually a kind of thought? Readers who work through all of the contributions to the volume might well start to think that the philosophers and psychologists in this nearby world have fixed on something that we have neglected.