William James had a complete disdain for the study of inner speech, because, to him, it was a ghost: impossible to observe. The French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget insisted that private speech signified simple inability – it was the babble of a child without capacity for social communication with no relation to cognitive functioning at all. Through much of the 20th century, Piaget seized the reigns of child development, insisting that children had to reach a developmental stage before learning could occur. Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Vygotsky said that learning occurred, then the brain developed. Piaget said the brain developed, then learning occurred.
Do people in adulthood experience inner speech in the same way as children – or even as each other? Do most of us even have an inner voice – an internal commentator narrating our lives and experiences from one moment to the next?
‘There are a lot of people who believe that you talk to yourself allof the time, so that’s a form of external pressure to say you were inner speaking when maybe you weren’t,’ he notes. For example, noted consciousness researcher Bernard Baars has asserted that ‘overt speech takes up perhaps a tenth of the waking day; but inner speech goes on all the time’. Hurlburt’s research shows this isn’t true; he finds that inner speech consumes about 25 per cent of an average person’s day, and thus, he is careful to not communicate any assumption about what type of inner experience a DES interviewee may have had at the time of the beep.
While PG was reading the OP, he realized that one of the instances in which he is most aware of his inner speech is when he is composing a legal document, often a contract.
His objective during such exercises is to be extremely precise with the words he uses and their operations in sentences and paragraphs. He actively seeks for possible alternative meanings and changes what he has written to avoid such alternatives and to create an expression that can only be interpreted to mean a single thing.
To this end, PG (and other lawyers) will sometimes insert a sentence that begins with something like, “For the avoidance of doubt”. The purpose of such sentences is to rule out a possible misinterpretation of a prior contract provision.
If a single “For the avoidance of doubt” sentence doesn’t do the trick, another sentence beginning with, “For the further avoidance of doubt” can be employed.
The technique is used to state as precisely as possible what rights each party owns or controls and help deal with potential edge cases by describing what each party does not own or control.
PG’s inner voice is, to the best of his knowledge, always hard at work on such occasions and he is actively seeking to discover any ways in which the contract language might be misinterpreted or used to support a double meaning.
Do I understand no longer being held responsible for your errors in judgement and no longer having to lie to customers as part of my job for the meager sums I’m paid?
“Yes.” Wondering if the afternoon now holds for me a time wasting mind-sucking meeting or the enticing smell of spent gunpowder on the range.
Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender ask if he wants a drink. Descartes says, “I think not,” and vanishes.
Zeugma! where there are many levels of meaning in the sentence.
Have some madeira, m’dear. You really have nothing to fear.
You shouldn’t drink spirits at this time of night.
Have some madeira, m’dear. It’s really much nicer than beer.
I’ve got a small cask of it here.
And once it’s been opened, you know it won’t keep.
I am very verbal, so my inner voice never shuts up. I am pretty sure it chatters for well over the average of 25 percent of the day.
Not that it is always grammatical. But I always know what it means.
“Passlockmoney” is exactly the sort of phrase that a good novelist can make us understand by narrating the character’s inner thoughts. Alexander McCall Smith is especially good at this. In Agatha Christie, we usually get the phrase first and the explanation later.
That popular ‘book exchange’ on Facebook is terrible, deceptive, and probably illegal Talk Like a Pirate Day!