Review of Philosophy and Psychology

, Volume 7, Issue 3, pp 541–557 | Cite as

Thinking, Inner Speech, and Self-Awareness

Article
First Online:

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Practical Knowledge Serial Operation Propositional Knowledge Auditory Experience Obsessive Thought 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Warwick UniversityCoventryUK

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