Imperfect Cognitions

  Today's post is written by Peter Langland-Hassan and Agustin Vicente.  Peter Langland-Hassan  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the  University of Cincinnati .  Agustin Vicente  is  Ikerbasque Research Professor  at the  University of the Basque Country , Linguistics Department. In this post, they present their new edited volume" Inner Speech: New Voices ".  Our new anthology, Inner Speech: New Voices (OUP, 2018), is the first in philosophy to focus on inner speech—a phenomenon known, colloquially, as “talking to yourself silently” or “the little voice in the head.” The book is interdisciplinary in spirit and practice, bringing together philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists to discuss the multiple controversies surrounding the nature and cognitive role of the inner voice. Readers of this blog may be most familiar with theoretical work on inner speech as it occurs in the context of explaining Auditory Verba...

In this post, Sam Wilkinson (below right) introduces a forthcoming Special Issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, that he co-edited with psychologist Ben Alderson-Day (below left), on “Voices and Thoughts in Psychosis”. If we experience thoughts in our head, how can they seem to not be our own? To understand this, we need to explore what thoughts are and how we know them in the first place. In his paper (“Thinking, Inner Speech, and Self-awareness”) Johannes Roessler outlines two views about knowledge of our own thoughts, attributed to Gilbert Ryle. The first is that we are “alive to” our own thoughts in the “serial process” of thinking, and the second is that we can “eavesdrop” on our inner speech, and interpret our own utterances in much the same was as we interpret the utterances of others. Roessler suggests that the former account is the one that is relevant for understanding thought insertion. In her paper (“On Thought Insertion”) Rachel Gunn questions the o...