Inner Speech ― New Voices

Inner speech lies at the chaotic intersection of several difficult questions in contemporary philosophy and psychology. On the one hand, these episodes are private mental events. On the other, they resemble speech acts of the sort used in interpersonal communication. Inner speech episodes seem to constitute or express sophisticated trains of conceptual thought but, at the same time, they are motoric in nature and draw on sensorimotor mechanisms for speech production and perception more generally. By using inner speech, we seem to both regulate our bodily actions and gain a unique kind of access to our own beliefs and desires. Inner Speech: New Voices explores this familiar and yet mysterious element of our daily lives, bringing together contributions from leading philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. In response to renewed interest in the general connections between thought, language, and consciousness, these leading thinkers develop a number of important new theories, raise questions about the nature of inner speech and its cognitive functions, and debate the current controversies surrounding the 'little voice in the head.'

Peter Langland-Hassan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. He has published widely on topics ranging from imagination to inner speech to introspection and self-knowledge. His current projects include a monograph on imagination and an empirical study of inner speech and metacognition in people with aphasia. Langland-Hassan was a postdoctoral researcher at Washington University in St. Louis, in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology (PNP) program and he holds a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Agustin Vicente is a philosopher of mind, psychology, language, and science. He gained a PhD in Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country in 1998. Having worked at different Spanish universities and visited several universities abroad, Vicente now works for the Ikerbasque Foundation for Science, in the Basque Country as a Research Professor. He writes, often in collaboration, on semantics and pragmatics, language and thought with a special focus on inner speech, and physicalism and naturalism. Vicente has published papers at prestigious venues such as Nous, Linguistics and Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Lingua, Mind and Language, and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.