Consider these three lines:
—Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?
Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?
—Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering.1
The text is Ulysses, and the author, of course, is James Joyce. The first line records direct speech. Someone is saying something. So, too, the third line. In interpreting the first and third line as readers, we accept the convention that what a character says expresses what he means. The second line is different. It represents, or depicts, an interior monologue. It is easy enough to paraphrase the monologue from the outside. Stephen thought or observed that the face was alarmed; he thought that it expressed a question; he wondered; he asked. The second line itself represents, depicts, or expresses Stephen’s point of view. That is why it is an interior monologue. Does the interior monologue express Stephen’s thoughts? If so, was he using these very words, and if these very words, are they his thoughts? Or is he, in fact, still another reader describing his thoughts by these particular words when, in fact, very many other words would do as well? These are not easy questions to address.
Opinions have been endlessly divided. In the Theaetetus, Plato described thinking as “a talk which the soul has with itself.”2 If the soul is talking to itself, in what is it talking? Attic Greek? Do those interior voices admit of a still further interior monologue? Thomas Aquinas regarded inner speech as a way to practice outer speech,3 but no native speaker requires practice in order to speak, if only because no native speaker is ever rehearsing what he has already said. Lev Vygotsky saw the interior monologue as a condensed and fragmented type of speech, without grammatical subjects and with idiosyncratic meaning. Some of the interior monologue in Ulysses reflects Vygotsky’s point of view: “None nought said nothing,” thinks Leopold Bloom. “Hates sewing. Might take an objection,” Bloom thinks in another instance. “I am almosting it,” Stephen tells himself.4
How can a private event such as inner speech be scientifically studied? This is the question that has prompted Peter Langland-Hassan and Agustín Vicente’s Inner Speech: New Voices.5 One technique is known as Descriptive Experience Sampling. Subjects are prompted randomly to take notice of their thoughts—whether inner speech, visual imagery, or the impression of thoughts that did not manifest in any medium—and record them as best they can. This method receives its share of attention in Inner Speech. Composed of papers by philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists, the contributions vary in their accounts of what inner speech is and does. Many of the empirical methods used to study inner speech, such as questionnaires and self-reports, are found wanting. Does Descriptive Experience Sampling fare any better? It is hard to say. So far, it has been used almost exclusively by Russell Hurlburt and his colleagues. Other researchers will perhaps find that Hurlburt and company have trained interviewers in ways that may lead participants toward certain responses. The results may not be replicable or even robust.6
Most scholars agree that inner speech is similar to outer speech in that they share grammatical form. The brain regions that are activated when speaking out loud are also activated during internal speech, and aphasias affecting the production of overt speech can impact inner speech. The book covers some of this ground.
Few linguists were commissioned to contribute to the book. It is a missed opportunity. Many issues discussed in the book are the purview of linguists and could have received better treatment. In speaking of language, linguists mean neither a particular language, such as Latin, nor the act of communication. Language is an abstract system of signs,7 and represents a human capacity, one not possessed by animals. Most linguists today subscribe to the Aristotelian idea that language is sound with meaning.8 The connection between sound and meaning is mediated by syntax. Trees and brackets serve to show how sentences are hierarchically structured. This is a useful way to demonstrate how a sentence such as The boy saw the man with binoculars is ambiguous. It can receive two different syntactical interpretations.
A syntactical hierarchy exists in two dimensions, but speech only in one. For hierarchies to be produced in speech, they must be linearized, as the organs for speech can only produce segments one by one. The same is true for hand signing.9 Hierarchical structures need to be converted into strings of words in a certain order. To produce speech is to turn the hierarchies that language generates into strings that can be externalized, either to ourselves as inner speech or to others as outer speech.
Linguistics on this level offers an account of what language is, but not how language is produced. Still, this description meshes nicely with a well-known model of language production credited to Willem Levelt. Language production starts with the formulation of a thought. This is followed by a selection of words organized by a grammar into a sentence. Commands to the organs of speech then produce a message.10 On this view, the main difference between inner and outer speech is simply whether those commands are given. Recent research shows that during the production of speech, the brain encodes the motor commands to produce speech.11 In inner voice, the missing motor command is phonation. All other speaking organs are set in motion.
Levelt’s model has come under criticism for being too simple. We do not always express whatever message we initially entertain. Speech is full of false starts and changes of perspective. False starts and changes in speech point to the adjustments speakers make to put their message across in the clearest way possible. It is rarely true that one thinks and directly one speaks.
In his contribution to the book under review, Peter Carruthers argues that inner speech arose in order to enable the rehearsal and evaluation of overt speech.12 His case is partly based on an assumption, widely held by philosophers, that the sentences of language are assigned their meaning when they are interpreted by hearers in context. The sentences of inner speech become meaningful when they are heard and comprehended by those who think them.13
This argument does not stand on solid ground. Linguists disagree with the assumption that sentences are assigned meaning only when interpreted in a social context. The meaning of a sentence is established within the linguistic system before it is uttered. We do not utter sentences devoid of meaning until they are interpreted.14
Carruthers suggests that the meaning of inner speech sentences is broadcast to the mind’s other cognitive faculties—problem-solving, for example. Other contributors to the book defend similar ideas. Christopher Gauker identifies problem-solving with conversing with ourselves.15 Conversation, he argues, is the medium in which thought is revealed. An act of speech is itself an act of thought.17
Keith Frankish associates speech to intentional and conscious reasoning. Problem-solving is a matter of breaking down a problem into sub-problems. Although initially plausible, this idea is unlikely and unnecessary. The use of language is creative, as Noam Chomsky has observed time and again.17 Native speakers have mastered an infinite repertoire by finite means. What a native speaker says is typically relevant to the circumstances of conversation. And language does not depend on stimuli. No matter the circumstances, there is no telling just what a native speaker will say about them.
Chomsky first discussed the stimulus independence of language in a 1959 review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.18 Chomsky took issue with Skinner’s concept of stimulus control. Stimulus control occurs when a situation—exposure to a piece of music or painting, for example—prompts the person experiencing it to utter the relevant words—such as Mozart or Dutch. Nonsense, Chomsky argued. A person may say something else completely while observing a Dutch painting: Clashes with the wallpaper, I thought you liked abstract work, Never saw it before, Tilted, Hanging too low, Beautiful, Hideous, Remember our camping trip last summer?19
Or he may say nothing at all. There is no causal connection between stimuli and what one may choose to say about them.
This is not entirely true of thinking. A person seeing a car cannot help but entertain the idea of a car. But the person need not say car, mentally or aloud. The situation is mirrored in the laboratory. I once tested a problem-solving experiment in which participants were each presented with a railway track and the task to reorder the coaches of a train. The participant could move the coaches to a side track, to be stored and then moved later. A letter was assigned to each coach. If the task was to reorder an A-B-C-D-E-F train into a C-A-B-D-F-E one, the participant would divide the main problem into subproblems. Participants seemed to act as if they were following a plan of action, but they do not report having formulated a strategy to themselves in inner speech. This is the point. A plan need not be put into words.20 Speech is not the primary causal factor in reasoning or problem solving.
This remains counterintuitive. Here is Joyce imagining Stephen answering a question in the middle of another exchange:
—I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life. Can you feel that? I owe nothing. Can you?
Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Koehler, three guineas, Mrs MacKernan, five weeks’ board. The lump I have is useless.
—For the moment, no, Stephen answered.21
This inner speech event is unlikely. Did Stephen need to be so exhaustive? Putting words to thoughts is not a necessary condition to thinking.22
Chomsky’s original point was about outer speech, but it is even more compelling for inner speech. Who can control their inner speech? Not Joyce. Here is Stephen once more, this time trying to drown out his family’s chatter:
I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus. We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names.23
Interior monologue has many uses—as a memory aid, for self-motivation, to rehearse speech or focus attention, to imagine conversations and dialogues, and more. But inner speech will not accommodate the overstretched roles some philosophers have given it, a case of over-intellectualizing what goes on in inner speech. Nor is it obvious that its study will ever allow for scientific treatment.
And yet inner speech is a crucial feature of our lives, one that ought to shed light on human nature. Chomsky has suggested we can only expect to find insight into human nature in works of literature. Writers are better judges of such things.
