The Agentive Role of Inner Speech in Self-Knowledge

Abstract

Although interpretivists are right to give inner speech a central role in generating selfknowledge, they mischaracterize the precise nature of this role. Inner speech is fundamentally an action, a form of speech, and provides us with self-knowledge not by being something that we perceive (or “quasi-perceive”) and interpret, but by being something that we knowingly do. Once this is appreciated, interpretivism is undermined.