Inner Speech, Speech Acts, and the Metaphysics of Language
Wade Munroe
There is scant mention of inner speech in the extensive literature on speech-act theory and recent work on the metaphysics of words and other linguistic entities. This is a substantial oversight. My post is a rallying cry: Inner speech shouldn’t be relegated to the periphery of our theorizing about language and its uses; it should be at the center. In addition, I argue that dominant assumptions in speech-act theory and the metaphysics of language don’t clearly hold for inner speech. Thus, a proper treatment of inner speech will pressure extant accounts of speech acts and the metaphysics of language.
Inner Speech at the Center
When it comes to our conscious uses of inner speech, inner and overt speech exhibit substantial similarity in terms of (i) the cognitive process and brains regions that subserve their production and (ii) the reasons we use the two. Given (i) and (ii), we have good reason to treat inner and overt speech as continuous in our theorizing about language and its uses. In the following, I discuss (i) and (ii) in turn.
Inner speech is produced in much the same way as overt speech, except that articulation is suppressed. Standard models of speech planning and production in psycholinguistics are also used to model inner speech (Grandchamp et al., 2019). Of course, overt speech additionally involves the movement of speech articulators (as well as requisite motor planning), but inner and overt speech don’t differ at the level of language planning proper, that is, processing of semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological features of linguistic constructions.
In terms of usage, we employ inner speech in ways that functionally resemble overt speech. For instance, we issue ourselves silent speech acts, like injunctions, questions, and words of encouragement or reproach (Morin, Uttl, & Hamper, 2011). And we strategically modulate various aspects of the language used—e.g., grammatical features like Mood and Person—in ways that mirror our use of language in interpersonal exchange (Wallentin & Nedergaard, 2023; Wiltschko, 2025). For example, covertly telling yourself, “You can do it!” tends to be more effective in increasing motivation relative to telling yourself, “I can do it!” More generally, the use of the second Person in inner speech can facilitate prospective behavioral intentions relative to the first Person (Dolcos & Albarracin, 2014). Importantly, these motivational uses of inner speech aren’t idle chatter. For instance, Gade and Paelecke (2019) found that inner speech habits related to motivational and evaluative uses of language predicted better performance on various executive functioning tasks (e.g., flanker tasks) even when controlling for working memory capacity and intelligence.
Of course, when we overtly encourage others in language we use the second Person. Thus, we appear to spontaneously use the same grammatical Person for the matrix subject in contexts of inter and intrapersonal encouragement (Zell, Warriner, & Albarracín, 2012). Martínez-Manrique and Vicente (2015, p. 8) nicely summarize my point when they write, “[t[here seems to be no deep difference between reasons why we talk to ourselves and reasons why we talk to someone else….Moreover, there seems to be no deep difference between the way we talk to ourselves and the way we talk to someone else.”
Although estimates of the frequency of conscious inner speech usage varies interpersonally (and by method used to measure frequency), it’s safe to conclude that inner speech occupies a substantial portion of our waking lives (Heavey & Hurlburt, 2008; Morin et al., 2011). As Noam Chomsky aptly puts it, “inner speech is most of speech. Almost all the use of language is to oneself” (Chomsky, 2002, p. 148). To restrict theorizing about language and its uses to overt speech would be to restrict theorizing to the tip of the iceberg.
Inner Speech as a Challenge
It’s far from clear that dominant assumptions in speech-act theory and the metaphysics of language apply to inner speech. As an example, take intentionalist assumptions: It is standardly assumed that performing a speech act through the utterance of a natural language expression requires generating the utterance with an appropriate set of intentions (Bach & Harnish, 1979; Grice, 1957; Harris, Fogal, & Moss, 2018; Neale, 2004). It is also widely assumed that we use context-sensitive expressions, like demonstratives, with particular semantic values by intending to do so (Harris, 2016; King, 2014; Viebahn, 2020). More broadly, work on the metaphysics of language generally assumes that producing words through an utterance requires generating the utterance with an intention to produce those very words (Hawthorne & Lepore, 2011; Irmak, 2019; Kaplan, 2011).
Do intentionalist assumptions apply to inner speech? Arguably, no. To see why, it’s important to note that inner speech grants us two forms of control over overt speech that are (arguably) constitutive of intentional action, namely, distal and guiding control. We can use inner speech to distally plan what we are going to say prior to saying it. In addition, when we speak aloud, speech monitoring processes compare inner speech to afferent feedback (e.g., hearing ourselves speak) and to the speech planning process itself, which allows us to proximally guide overt speech in making rapid repairs (deletions, substitutions, insertions) as a speech stream evolves (Nozari, 2025). Without inner speech we’d be limited in our capacity to distally plan our speech and modulate what we are saying in real time.
Given inner speech’s role in the monitoring and control of over speech, we can see that we don’t have the same distal and guiding control over inner speech. To have the same control, there would need to be a second-order monitoring and control process that governs the first-order monitoring and control process of which inner speech is a part. However, there is no such second-order process. In other words, there is no inner-inner speech that would allow us to distally plan or proximally guide inner speech itself.
Much more needs to be said, but for reasons of space my arguments will remain schematic. I close with the following, suggestive remarks: The substantial similarity between inner and overt speech justifies treating the two as continuous in our theorizing about language and its uses. Yet, there are also differences between the two. Extant accounts of speech acts and the metaphysics of language risk making false assumptions that are artefacts of their nigh exclusive focus on overt speech.
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