Inner speech is commonly understood as the conscious experience of a voice within the mind. One recurrent theme in the scientific literature is that the phenomenon involves a representation of overt speech, for example, a representation of phonetic properties that result from a copy of speech instructions that were ultimately suppressed. I propose a larger picture that involves some embodied objects and their misperception. I call it “the Body Error Theory,” or BET for short. BET is (...) a form of illusionism, but the particular version I favor is a cross-modal illusion. Newly described here, my hypothesis is that the experience of inner speech arises from a mix of interoception and audition. Specifically, there is the detection of slight but well-confirmed activities in the speech musculature that occur during inner speech, which helps to transform representations of normal but quiet nonverbal sounds that inevitably occur during inner speech, from breathing to background noise, into a mistaken perception of inner speech. Simply put, activities in the speech musculature mix with sounds to create the appearance of speech sounds, which thus explains the “voice within the mind.” I also show how BET’s cross-modal system fits with standard information processing accounts for speech monitoring and how it accommodates the central insights of leading theories of inner speech. In addition, I show how BET is supported by data from experience-sampling surveys and how it can be empirically tested against its rivals. (shrink)

Much of what we say is never said aloud. It occurs only silently, as inner speech. We chastise, congratulate, joke and cajole, all without making a sound. This distinctively human ability to create public language in the privacy of our own minds is no less remarkable for its familiarity. And yet, until recently, inner speech remained at the periphery of philosophical and psychological theorizing. This essay collection, from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, (...) displays the rapidly growing interest among researchers in the puzzles surrounding the nature and cognitive role of the inner voice. Questions explored include: the aids and obstacles inner speech presents to self-knowledge; the complex relation it bears to overt speech production and perception; the means by which inner speech can be identified and empirically assessed; its role in generating auditory verbal hallucinations; and its relationship to conceptual thought itself. (shrink)

This paper aims to clear a path for the thesis that inner speech, in the very languages we speak, is the sole medium of all conceptual thought. First, it is argued that inner speech should not be identified with the auditory imagery of speech. Since they are distinct, there may be many more episodes of inner speech than those that are accompanied by auditory imagery. Second, it is argued that it is not necessary (...) to conceive of linguistic communication as a matter of the speaker’s revealing through words an underlying thought. Rather, acts of speech may be conceived as producing cooperation by intervening on processes of thought that are essentially imagistic. So conceived, the practice of speaking in language may acquire a function wholly internal to the individual, where it adds a layer of coordination to an underlying foundation of imagistic cognition. (shrink)

This is the introductory chapter to the anthology: Inner Speech: New Voices, to be published in fall 2018 by OUP. It gives an overview of current debates in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience concerning inner speech, and situates the chapters of the volume with respect to those debates.

Inner speech vs. anendophasia: Questions of information, serendipity, and the mental realm’s connection with nature.

Inner speech travels under many aliases: the inner voice, verbal thought, thinking in words, internal verbalization, “talking in your head,” the “little voice in the head,” and so on. It is both a familiar element of first-person experience and a psychological phenomenon whose complex cognitive components and distributed neural bases are increasingly well understood. There is evidence that inner speech plays a variety of cognitive roles, from enabling abstract thought, to supporting metacognition, memory, and executive (...) function. One active area of controversy concerns the relation of inner speech to auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia, with a common proposal being that sufferers of AVH misidentify their own inner speech as being generated by someone else. Recently, researchers have used artificial intelligence to translate the neural and neuromuscular signatures of inner speech into corresponding outer speech signals, laying the groundwork for a variety of new applications and interventions. (shrink)

Inner speech is known as the “little voice in the head” or “thinking in words.” It attracts philosophical attention in part because it is a phenomenon where several topics of perennial interest intersect: language, consciousness, thought, imagery, communication, imagination, and self-knowledge all appear to connect in some way or other to the little voice in the head. Specific questions about inner speech that have exercised philosophers include its similarities to, and differences from, outer speech; its (...) relationship to reasoning and conceptual thought; its broader cognitive roles—especially within metacognition and self-knowledge; and the role it can play in explanations of auditory verbal hallucinations and “thought insertion”. (shrink)

Many theorists claim that inner speech is importantly linked to human metacognition (thinking about one's own thinking). However, their proposals all rely upon unworkable conceptions of the content and structure of inner speech episodes. The core problem is that they require inner speech episodes to have both auditory-phonological contents and propositional/semantic content. Difficulties for the views emerge when we look closely at how such contents might be integrated into one or more states or processes. (...) The result is that, if inner speech is especially valuable to metacognition, we do not currently understand why it is. The article concludes with two positive proposals for understanding the content and structure of inner speech episodes, which should serve as constraints on future accounts of the metacognitive value of inner speech. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of inner speech in our mental lives, methods for objectively assessing inner speech capacities remain underdeveloped. The most common means of assessing inner speech is to present participants with tasks requiring them to silently judge whether two words rhyme. We developed a version of this task to assess the inner speech of a population of patients with aphasia and corresponding language production deficits. As expected, patients’ performance on the silent (...) rhyming task was severely impaired relative to controls. More surprisingly, however, patients’ performance on this task did not correlate with their performance on a variety of other standard tests of overt language abilities. In particular, patients who were generally unimpaired in their abilities to overtly name objects during confrontation naming tasks, and who could reliably judge when two words spoken to them rhymed, were still severely impaired (relative to controls) at completing the silent rhyme task. This seems to suggest that inner speech was more severely impaired in these patients than outer speech. However, these results should also cause us to critically reflect on the relation between inner speech and silent rhyme judgments more generally. (shrink)

We very often discover ourselves engaged in inner speech. It seems that this kind of silent, private, speech fulfils some role in our cognition, most probably related to conscious thinking. Yet, the study of inner speech has been neglected by philosophy and psychology alike for many years. However, things seem to have changed in the last two decades. Here we review some of the most influential accounts about the phenomenology and the functions of inner (...) speech, as well as the methodological problems that affect its study. (shrink)

A widespread view in philosophy claims that inner speech is closely tied to human metacognitive capacities. This so-called format view of inner speech considers that talking to oneself allows humans to gain access to their own mental states by forming metarepresentation states through the rehearsal of inner utterances (section 2). The aim of this paper is to present two problems to this view (section 3) and offer an alternative view to the connection between inner (...) speech and metacognition (section 4). According to this alternative, inner speech (meta)cognitive functions derivate from the set of commitments we mobilize in our communicative exchanges. After presenting this commitment-based approach, I address two possible objections (section 5). (shrink)

There is a theory about inner speech which holds that it is ‘dialogic’. This paper reviews this theory, evaluates the arguments which support it, and presents an argument against it.

This paper assesses two different approaches to inner speech that can be found in the literature. One of them regards inner speech as a vehicle of conscious thought. The other holds that inner speech is better characterised as an activity derived from social uses of its outer counterpart. In this paper I focus on the explanatory power of each approach to account for the control of attention and behaviour in the context of executive tasks. (...) I will argue that the vehicle view cannot capture some central cases of inner speech in executive tasks because they cannot be described as cases of bringing thought into consciousness. Then I will offer a revised version of the activity view and I will apply it to some examples so as to show that it is better posited to account for them. I end by considering two objections to the activity view and a possible way to address them. (shrink)

Background: Many people with aphasia and people without brain injury talk to themselves in their heads, i.e., have “inner speech.” Inner speech may be more preserved compared with spoken speech for some people with aphasia and may serve a variety of functions (e.g., emotion regulation), which motivates us to provide a high-fidelity characterization of it. Researchers have used multiple methods to measure this internal phenomenon in the past, which we combine here for the first time (...) in a single study. -/- Aims: We compare performance between individuals with and without aphasia on inner speech tasks that assess inner speech “inthe- moment” to general subjective impressions of inner speech to tease apart the relationship of aphasia severity to inner speech. Methods and Procedures: Twenty people with mild-moderate aphasia and twenty neurotypical controls completed several inner speech tasks, including objective silent rhyme judgements (picture, written, and auditory), subjective reports of inner speech during naming, and subjective rating scales about inner speech experience more generally. -/- Outcomes and Results: In-the-moment inner speech during silent rhyming tasks was associated with aphasia severity only for picture and written rhyming but not auditory rhyming. In-the-moment inner speech reports during silent naming were not associated with aphasia severity, nor were the subjective ratings about general inner speech experience. Individuals with and without aphasia demonstrated a variety of subjective general inner speech experiences, demonstrating heterogeneity of this phenomenon more broadly. -/- Conclusions: Methods of measuring inner speech complement each other and speak to different facets of the inner speech phenomenon, and clinicians and researchers must carefully choose the method(s) that will provide the information about inner speech that they desire. (shrink)

Inner speech is a pervasive feature of our conscious mental lives. Yet its function and character remain an issue of philosophical debate. The present paper focuses on the relation between inner speech and natural language and on the cognitive functions that various contributors have ascribed to inner speech. In particular, it is argued that inner speech does not consist of bare, context-free internal presentations of sentential (or subsentential) content, but rather has an (...) ineliminably perspectival element. The proposed model of inner speech, which characterizes inner speech as akin to the testimony of an inner interlocutor, accounts for this perspectival element and, it is argued, is explanatorily superior, insofar as it better explains, amongst other phenomena, the often condensed character of inner speech. (shrink)

This book will be a part of Routledge's "New Problems of Philosophy" series.

While the idea that thinking is a form of silent self-talk goes back at least to Plato, it is not immediately clear how to state this thesis precisely. The aim of the paper is to spell out the notion that we think in language by recourse to recent work on inner speech. To that end, inner speech and overt speech are briefly compared. I then propose that inner speaking be defined as a mental episode (...) that substantially engages the speech production system; the underlying model of speech production is sketched. Next, the cognitive role of inner speaking is explored, especially its role in thinking and reasoning. The question of whether it is a way of making thoughts accessible (to whomever) or whether it is a means of thinking itself is raised. I argue that there are two reasons for assuming that, occasionally, we think in language. More specifically, I will claim that some instances of thinking are instances of inner speaking as they exploit certain properties of natural language, and that some instances of inner speaking are instances of thinking as they play a decisive role in paradigmatic cases of thinking that result from internalizing and re-using certain social-linguistic practices. Finally, the Language-of-Thought hypothesis as an alternative account is critically discussed. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

A theory which has had significant influence seeks to explain auditory verbal hallucinations as utterances in inner speech which are not properly monitored and are consequently misattributed to some external source. This paper argues for a distinction between inner speech and imagined speech, on the basis that inner speech is a type of actual speech. The paper argues that AVHs are more likely instances of imagined speech, rather that inner (...) class='Hi'>speech, which are not properly monitored : 86–107, 2012), Cho and Wu and Cho and Wu, although they prefer a quite different explanation of AVHs). (shrink)

This paper assesses two different approaches to inner speech that can be found in the literature. One of them regards inner speech as a vehicle of conscious thought. The other holds that inner speech is better characterised as an activity derived from social uses of its outer counterpart. In this paper I focus on the explanatory power of each approach to account for the control of attention and behaviour in the context of executive tasks. (...) I will argue that the vehicle view cannot capture some central cases of inner speech in executive tasks because they cannot be described as cases of bringing thought into consciousness. Then I will offer a revised version of the activity view and I will apply it to some examples so as to show that it is better posited to account for them. I end by considering two objections to the activity view and a possible way to address them. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of inner speech. It takes the form of an introduction, which introduces the phenomenon; three long, largely independent chapters; a conclusion; and an appendix. -/- The first chapter deliberates between two possible theories as to the nature of inner speech. One of these theories is that inner speech is a kind of actual speech, just as much as external speech is a kind of actual speech. When (...) we engage in inner speech, we are actually speaking, but we are doing so silently. The other theory holds that inner speech is a kind of imagined speech. When we produce inner speech, we are imagining performing the action of speaking. The chapter argues for the theory that inner speech is a kind of actual speech. -/- The second chapter argues against a theory which holds that inner speech is dialogic. On this theory, a subject represents different perspectives in inner speech and a dialogue can take place in the same sense in which a dialogue can take place between different individuals in external speech. The chapter borrows some important material from the philosophy of language to show that this position, though it might have some intuitive appeal, is ultimately implausible. -/- The third chapter is concerned with the question whether inner speech can be a source of knowledge of our own beliefs. It shows that the view that inner speech can be such a source is subject to an adapted version of a problem from the epistemology of testimony: roughly, what justification do we have for believing that we believe what we say in inner speech? It makes use of some material from the recent debate about cognitive phenomenology to develop a version of the view which is not subject to this problem. It then provides some initial discussion of the merits of this view. -/- The appendix takes up a more practical issue regarding inner speech. There is a theory that auditory verbal hallucinations – i.e. experiences of voice-hearing – take place when someone produces an utterance in inner speech but loses track of the fact that they have produced the utterance. Accordingly, they have an experience as of something being said and, not realising that they are the source of the experience, postulate some external cause, i.e. someone else speaking. The appendix develops an alternative account which has been suggested in the literature, at times drawing upon earlier work in the dissertation. (shrink)

We respond to Moseley and Wilkinson's defense of inner speech models of AVH.

Little is known with regard to the precise cognitive tools the self uses in acquiring and processing information about itself. In this article, we underline the possibility that inner speech might just represent one such cognitive process. Duval and Wicklund’s theory of self-awareness and the selfconsciousness, and self-knowledge body of work that was inspired by it are reviewed, and the suggestion is put forward that inner speech parallels the state of self-awareness, is more frequently used among (...) highly self-conscious persons, and represents an effective, if not indispensable, tool involved in the formation of the self-concept. The possibility is also raised that the extent to which one uses inner speech could partially explain individual differences in self-consciousness and self-knowledge. A selective review of the private and inner speech literature is presented, and some possible ways of testing the hypothesis by using pre-existing techniques are proposed in the hope of stimulating empirical investigations. Some implications are outlined in conclusion. (shrink)

Abstract: How it is that one's own thoughts can seem to be someone else's? After noting some common missteps of other approaches to this puzzle, I develop a novel cognitive solution, drawing on and critiquing theories that understand inserted thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia as stemming from mismatches between predicted and actual sensory feedback. Considerable attention is paid to forging links between the first-person phenomenology of thought insertion and the posits (e.g. efference copy, corollary discharge) of current cognitive (...) theories. I show how deficits in the subconscious mechanisms regulating inner speech may lead to a 'fractured phenomenology' responsible for schizophrenic patients' reports of inserted thoughts and auditory verbal hallucinations. Supporting work on virtual environments is discussed, and lessons concerning the fixity of delusional belief are drawn. (shrink)

Inner speech represents the activity of talking to oneself in silence. It can be assessed with questionnaires, sampling methods, and electromyographic recordings of articulatory movements. Inner speech has been linked to thought processes and self-awareness. Private speech (speech-for-self emitted aloud by children) serves an important self-regulatory function. The frequency of private speech follows an inverted-U relation with age, peaking at 3-4 years of age and disappearing at age 10. Social and inner (...) class='Hi'>speech share a common neurological basis: Broca’s area. Dysfunctional self-talk is known to mediate many pathological conditions; negative selfverbalizations have a more significant debilitating impact than positive ones. (shrink)

The idea that thinking is a form of talking to oneself was discussed in classical Greece, analyzed by the Medievals and treated as a central issue by the American pragmatists. But whether inner speech is a language unto itself, distinct from outer language, has not been determined. To this end I ask how Saussure's defining ideas about language apply to inner speech. I show that Saussure's ideas, while partly usable, are mainly a poor fit. Inner (...) speech is a variety of language, or perhaps of dialect, with its own unique structure. Given that it is a unique window into human consciousness, I briefly discuss some of the research areas on which it sheds light. (shrink)

The use of human language is a hallmark of human consciousness, even when it is not used publicly. Inner speech is the way humans consciously communicate with themselves and arguably a key factor contributing to the formation of more self-aware selves. From the perspective of cognitive science and artificial cognitive architectures, inner speech can be also seen as a meta-management system that modulates some cognitive processes of the subject. In this paper, we describe a preliminary version (...) of a computational model of inner speech generation based on the cognitive architecture CERA-CRANIUM. This inner speech generation method is illustrated using a video game non-player character as the subject of the first-person narratives to be produced. We also use this model of inner speech generation to discuss the possibilities of using such a first-person narrative stream as a meta-control input to the artificial cognitive architecture. We argue that this verbal input might be used as an integrated self-explanation of the agent in the world and thus contribute to the formation of self. (shrink)

We welcome Cho and Wu’s suggestion that the study of auditory verbal hallucinations could be improved by contrasting and testing more explanatory models. However, we have some worries both about their criticisms of inner speech-based self-monitoring models and whether their proposed spontaneous activation model is explanatory.

Pickering & Garrod (P&G) consider the possibility that inner speech might be a product of forward production models. Here I consider the idea of inner speech as a forward model in light of empirical work from the past few decades, concluding that, while forward models could contribute to it, inner speech nonetheless requires activity from the implementers.

To some it is a shallow platitude that inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component. To others, it is an empirical hypothesis with accumulating support. To yet others it is a false dogma. In this chapter, I defend the claim that inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component, confining the claim to adults with ordinary speech and hearing. It is one thing, I emphasize, to assert that inner speech often, or even typically, has (...) an auditory-phonological component—quite another to propose that it always does. When forced to argue for the stronger point, we stand to make a number of interesting discoveries about inner speech itself, and about our means for discriminating it from other psycholinguistic phenomena. Establishing the stronger conclusion also provides new leverage on debates concerning how we should conceive of, diagnose, and explain auditory verbal hallucinations and “inserted thoughts” in schizophrenia. (shrink)

A resurgence of interest in inner speech as a core feature of human experience has not yet coincided with methodological progress in the empirical study of the phenomenon. The present article reports the development and psychometric validation of a novel instrument, the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire , designed to assess the phenomenological properties of inner speech along dimensions of dialogicality, condensed/expanded quality, evaluative/motivational nature, and the extent to which inner speech incorporates (...) other people’s voices. In response to findings that some forms of psychopathology may relate to inner speech, anxiety, depression, and proneness to auditory and visual hallucinations were also assessed. Anxiety, but not depression, was found to be uniquely positively related to both evaluative/motivational inner speech and the presence of other voices in inner speech. Only dialogic inner speech predicted auditory hallucination-proneness, with no inner speech variables predicting levels of visual hallucinations/disturbances. Directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Several theories propose that one of the core functions of inner speech (IS) is to support subjects in the completion of cognitively effortful tasks, especially those involving executive functions (EF). In this paper we focus on two populations who notoriously encounter difficulties in performing EF tasks, namely, people diagnosed with schizophrenia who experience auditory verbal hallucinations (Sz-AVH) and people within the Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC). We focus on these two populations because they represent two different ways in which (...) IS can fail to help in EF tasks, which can be illustrative for other mental conditions. First, we review the main components of EF (Section 1). Then we explain the functions that IS is taken to perform in the domain of EF (Section 2) and review the evidence concerning problems about EF in the two populations of our study: Sz-AVH (Section 3) and ASC (Section 4). After this we further detail our account about what a properly functioning IS can do for both populations and how different IS profiles may impact EF performance: in the case of Sz-AVH, the uncontrolled and intrusive character of IS negatively affects EF performance, whereas in ASC, EF is not sufficiently supported by IS, given the tendency in this population to present a diminished use of IS (Section 5). We finally briefly discuss Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Developmental Language Disorders (DLD). (shrink)

While philosophers generally agree that there can be no direct experience of the foreign consciousness, Simone de Beauvoir argues that literature makes it possible for us to enter the Other’s world. I will investigate the ways in which the position of the other and the position of the self-become one in the literary experience. Using phenomenology of the body as my point of departure, and analyzing the differences and convergences between verbal and literary communication acts, I will argue that the (...) text takes the place of the “inner speech” in the reading act. Consequently, the literary text acquires a kind of ownness, while it also appears as spoken by the other and having a reader-independent existence as a physical or electronic object. Literature does not provide us with the same possibilities of reciprocity, spatial perception and role-reversals as face-to-face encounters do; yet the very absence of the embodied other facilitates the adaption of his or her position and world as “one’s own”. (shrink)

This article explores “Inner Speech Account of Introspection”, according to which inner speech is the source of our introspective self-knowledge. The view hypothesizes that we come to know that we are thinking that p by being aware of the sentence of inner speech “p” accompanying the thought. I argue for Inner Speech Account by showing that it explains six explananda imposed for the philosophical theories of introspection; peculiar access, privileged access, detection condition, (...) the lack of phenomenology, occurent/dispositional distinction, and content/attitude distinction. (shrink)

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an incredibly sophisticated chatbot. Its capability is astonishing: as well as conversing with human interlocutors, it can answer questions about history, explain almost anything you might think to ask it, and write poetry. This level of achievement has provoked interest in questions about whether a chatbot might have something similar to human intelligence or even consciousness. Given that the function of a chatbot is to process linguistic input and produce linguistic output, we consider the (...) question whether a sophisticated chatbot might have inner speech. That is: Might it talk to itself, internally? We explored this via a conversation with ‘Playground’, a chatbot which is very similar to ChatGPT but more flexible in certain respects. We asked it questions which, plausibly, can only be answered if one first produces some inner speech. Here, we present our findings and discuss their philosophical significance. (shrink)

Invited paper for the Oxford Companion to Consciousness, in press.

Carruthers’ notion that natural language(s) might serve as the medium of non-domain-specific, propositionally based inferential thought is extended to the case of effortful retrieval of autobiographical memory among bilinguals. Specifically, the review suggests that the resources of bilingual inner speech might play a role in the cyclical activation of information from various informational domains during memory retrieval.

There is a growing literature in philosophy dealing with the phenomenon of inner speech, that is, the activity of speaking to oneself in one’s mind. This paper highlights a feature of inner speech which has not yet been noticed in this literature: that there is something distinctive that it is like to make a sincere assertion in inner speech. The paper then traces out two implications of this observation. The first relates to the question (...) of how we should characterise inner speech; the second relates to the question of how inner speech may play a role in self-attributions of belief. (shrink)

Passivity experiences in schizophrenia are thought to be due to a failure in a neurocognitive action self-monitoring system . Drawing on the assumption that inner speech is a form of action, a recent model of auditory verbal hallucinations has proposed that AVHs can be explained by a failure in the NASS. In this article, we offer an alternative application of the NASS to AVHs, with separate mechanisms creating the emotion of self-as-agent and other-as-agent. We defend the assumption that (...) inner speech can be considered as a form of action, and show how a number of previous criticisms of applying the NASS to AVHs can be refuted. This is achieved in part through taking a Vygotskian developmental perspective on inner speech. It is suggested that more research into the nature and development of inner speech is needed to further our understanding of AVHs. (shrink)

Four extensions of Carruthers’ arguments are given. (1) Specifics of the Vygotskyan tradition can enhance his claims. (2) Linguistic relativity might be seen as variation in how logical form (LF) and phonetic form (PF)serve working memory. (3) Language aids intermodular thinking because it makes representations maximally visible. (4) Language for intermodular thinking is not hardwired but opportunistic.

Imagine that scientists have been successful at designing a drug that “freezes” brain areas producing our internal monologue. After taking the drug you can’t talk to yourself anymore. Every other mental activity is fine, but it’s now total silence in your head. Not a word. What would happen? What would it be like?

This article explores the importance of mental expression in understanding the phenomenon of inner speech. Most accounts of inner speech assume from the outset the common idea that the expressions of a subject (e.g., a smile) and their mental states (e.g., joy) are two different types of items somehow related to each other. This relational view of expression is challenged in this article. Firstly, it is argued that relational views of expression cannot explain some features of (...) inner speech. Secondly, a non-relational view of expression is developed, according to which mental states are patterns of expressive behavior. Thirdly, it is argued that only from the framework of non-relational expressivism is it possible to explain the main features of inner speech. Finally, it is concluded that non-relational expressivism emerges as a prominent contender among contemporary views of the mind, as it provides the only account of inner speech that can fully explain the phenomenon. (shrink)