Daphne Bernués
Affiliation: Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: inner speech, agency, conscious thought, subintentional action
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 15:30
Location: Room 154 (154)
View the full session: Thinking & Worrying
In a prominent view of inner speech, the “activity view”, inner speech is conceived as the action of speaking, although innerly. Inner speech is seen as functionally continuous with outer speech; just as with outer speech one can do many things (assert, command, ask a question), inner speech is used this way too (to assert, self-command, ask oneself a question). For defenders of the activity view:
Speaking is an action that begins with a prior intention to express a certain thought and plausibly finishes with the production of some sounds that have a certain meaning. The typical inner speech is that kind of action, except that sounds are not produced but simulated.” (Martínez-Manrique and Vicente, 2015, p. 11).
On a complementary approach, one may focus on the discontinuities, instead of the continuities, between inner and outer speech. In this paper, I target an important but underexplored discontinuity: the level of agency. Contrary to outer speech, in inner speech there is a large number of episodes that are produced unintentionally or outside our intentional control. Ocurrent thoughts, intrusive thoughts, and (typical forms of) mindwandering are examples of this. Metzinger (2013; 2017), for instance, argues that because mindwandering occupies two-thirds of our cognitive activity, “unintentional behavior” in the mental is the rule rather than the exception. And because mindwandering is often verbal (Perrone-Bertolotti et al., 2014), this positions inner speech as a phenomenon that, in many of its instances and contrary to what is typical in its outer version, is made of unintentional speaking behavior.
I argue that unintentional inner speech creates a certain tension for the activity view. If inner speech is the action of speaking, and speaking starts with a prior intention to express a thought, one might wonder whether unintentional episodes are accurately described as actions of this sort. How do unintentional episodes express thought? The activity view lacks an account of action that accommodates both the intentional and the unintentional episodes, and explains their differences. In this paper, I propose such an account drawing from Pacherie’s model of intentions and the literature on subintentional actions. This will provide a framework of analysis for the action status of inner speech in its different occurrences.
Pacherie’s model (2006; 2008; 2014) differentiates three levels of intention that are hierarchically structured: “distal intentions” represent an action whose time and place need not be specified (they represent an action in the abstract, e.g., to eat); “proximal intentions” represent the specific action or set of actions selected given the current context (e.g., to cook pasta); and “motor intentions” guide the movements required for the action in a fast, fine-grained, and largely unconscious manner (e.g., to grab a pot). In action, the three levels interact, and higher levels constrain or even determine the activity at the ones below.
According to this model, in an action of speaking, e.g. a person in the street asks you for directions, one’s proximal intention (of giving the directions) “orchestrates” the articulatory mechanisms at the motor level. From the moment one intends to communicate the directions, the agent must engage in a vast number of “smaller actions” and subpersonal processes of which only some remain within the conscious, proximal level (e.g., one may consciously choose more polite words). The majority of “smaller actions” involved will be performed automatically: positioning the verbs and nouns in the right order, choosing morphemes correctly, or placing the articulatory muscles. In Pacherie’s model, the positioning of the articulatory muscles is guided by motor intentions, and their control is a downstream effect of the intentions held at the level(s) above.
If we apply this model to inner speech, and more specifically, to the unintentional kinds, we meet the challenge of explaining actions of speaking where a proximal intention to express something (and its correspondent control) seems lacking. One explanation is to grant that, even if motor intentions typically “look at” what the proximal intentions dictate, they may also run independent (after all, we don’t have a conscious, proximal intention to do something every second of our life). The problem is that the labor of motor intentions does not seem to cover all that is needed to produce an utterance. They cover the movement of the articulatory muscles necessary for its (simulated) pronounciation, but what ensures that what is produced is a grammatically correct, meaningful utterance (its formulation)? There seems to be the need for a control-oriented representation (an intention) to express something, and this must pertain to a higher level than the motor. The level above, however (proximal intentions), seems inadequate; they involve conscious, personal-level control (Pacherie, 2007) (subjects “decide” them), but unintentional inner speech does not seem to come from this sort of control.
I propose that “subintentions” (the “intentions” of subintentional actions) are the ones responsible for formulation of unintentional (inner) speech (ocurrent thoughts, intrusive thoughts, and verbal mindwandering). Still debated in the literature (Hornett, 2024), subintentional actions are actions that are performed unconsciously and are not performed for a reason (O’Shaughnessy, 1980). Typical examples of subintentional actions are “absent-mindedly scratching one’s head” or “fiddling with one’s jewelry” (Steward, 2009). They are actions, however, because they are behaviors whose “doings” we naturally ascribe to ourselves (Steward, 2009), and this typically entails we exert some minimal control over them. This category is interesting because, the same way one does not “decide” to fiddle with one’s jewelry, one does not “decide” to express an occurrent thought in inner speech—but both remain in the category of things we do. In both cases, the agent is “carried along” by her absent-minded onset of an action—an action that is independent from the relevant activity at the conscious level.
The upshot of the paper is that, in inner speech, a subject can have a subintention to express a thought, and some relevant instances of thought expression (those unexplained in the activity view: the unintentional episodes) can be thought of as being preceded by intentions to speak that operate below a relevant level of consciousness.