People often talk as though their thoughts were a constant stream of an inner voice speaking aloud in their heads. I find this strange, because unless I am rehearsing what I want to say or write, or am trying to imagine a debate between two or more people, there aren't ever any voices in my head. When I think about things, the thoughts aren't verbal; they're just there, both like weighted, kinetic mechanisms and like colors at once. I don't think: "Today I have to feed the cat, read Wittgenstein and do the dishes, and I would like to find the time to watch a movie with my girlfriend." That would be bizarre. The thoughts are just there, maybe flashes of cats and the word "Wittgenstein" and some vague notions of duty and cleaning and my girlfriend's name. I know them, without hearing them or seeing them written. So why do people talk as though there were a voice in their heads? I thought only schizophrenics heard voices.
well, SOME thoughts are 'inner monologues," it seems; especially the most articulated, clearest thoughts we have; so it seems reasonable to treat that as a significant category of "thoughts". Or at least they SEEM to be articulated verbally, even if not out loud; your point that they are not literally 'heard' is a very good one, but the similarity to what is or can be heard is striking enough that it doesn't seem misplaced to imagine these thoughts quite literally expressed verbally, even if silently. But just the same you are surely right that not ALL 'thought' can fit this model (if any at all can) -- so to me a related question might be why it is, exactly, that some thinking seems so closely affiliated with language while other thinking does not .... Julian Jaynes has a great book from the 1970s: "Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" in which he suggests (amongst other things) that schizophrenia results in people being unable to distinguish their inner monologue from ...
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