The Cognitive Science Seminar Series welcomes guest presenter Wade Munroe, postdoctoral research fellow, Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science. Wade will present "Thinking Through Talking to Yourself: Inner Speech as a Vehicle of Conscious Reasoning."

ABSTRACT
Our conscious thought, at least at times, seems suffused with language. We may experience deliberation as if we were ‘talking in our head’, thus using inner speech to verbalize our premises, lemmas, and conclusions without employing our vocal tract to generate explicit utterances. The claim that we can consciously reason through inner speech—that is, that inner speech can serve as the representational vehicle for conscious reasoning—is, prima facie, intuitively compelling. Even those who are dubious of the claim offer explanations for why it may erroneously appear as if inner speech ‘utterances’ can constitute occurrent propositional attitudes, like occurrent judgements, suppositions, etc. (cf. Carruthers 2011). However, intuitions notwithstanding, the claim that we can consciously reason through inner speech takes considerable work to defend.

Peter Langland-Hassan (2014) has forcefully argued that, insofar as inner speech possesses a sensory, vocal character, it cannot carry the sort of propositional contents required to function as, say, an occurrent judgment in conscious deliberation. In this talk, I argue that, pace Langland-Hassan, an inner speech utterance can be the bearer of propositional contents such that it can function as an occurrent judgment. As I demonstrate, the functional role a mental state plays in working memory is determined in a flexible and context sensitive manner by metacognitive monitoring and control procedures. An inner speech utterance functions as an occurrent judgment (and can, thus, function as a premise, lemma, or conclusion in a line of conscious reasoning) when it is experienced with a level of certainty that exceeds one’s threshold of confidence for acceptance. In virtue of an agent experiencing an inner speech utterance with a sufficient level of certainty, the utterance plays the functional role of an occurrent judgment through, e.g., terminating inquiry and causing overt actions (like overtly asserting the words rehearsed in inner speech) and further mental states (like further inner speech utterances).

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