Abstract
People talk not only to others but also to themselves. The self talk we engage in may be overt or covert, and is associated with a variety of higher mental functions, including reasoning, problem solving, planning and plan execution, attention, and motivation. When talking to herself, a speaker takes devices from her mother tongue, originally designed for interpersonal communication, and employs them to communicate with herself. But what could it even mean to communicate with oneself? To answer that question, we need a theory of communication that explains how the same linguistic devices may be used to communicate with others and oneself. On the received view, which defines communication as information exchange, self talk appears to be an anomaly, for it is hard to see the point of exchanging information with oneself. However, if communication is analysed as a way of negotiating commitments between speaker and hearer, then communication may be useful even when speaker and hearer coincide. Thus a commitment-based approach allows us to make sense of self talk as well as social talk.
Highlights
Self talk is a private practice that develops out of social talk, and it makes sense that we should seek to capture the continuity between the two practices by way of a theory of speech acts
First, that levels of overt self talk were positively correlated with task performance, and secondly, that there was a ∩-shaped relation between levels of self talk and task complexity
Apart from the fact that this study elegantly demonstrates how covert self talk may be detected, it shows that a task need not be exceptionally hard to elicit self talk, even in adults
Summary
. ] The soul when thinking appears to me to be just talking — asking questions of herself and answering them, affirming and denying.” (Theaetetus 190a, translation by Jowett 1871) Since Plato, the idea that self talk is an essential part of human psychology has been endorsed by a formidable cast of philosophers and, more recently, psychologists Amongst the latter, Vygotsky deserves special mention for highlighting the developmental aspect and canvassing the view that self talk develops out of, and is continuous with, social talk. Self talk is a private practice that develops out of social talk, and it makes sense that we should seek to capture the continuity between the two practices by way of a theory of speech acts. Adopting an idea that has been common currency in speech act theory since Austin (1962), I develop an alternative view, according to which communication is primarily a matter of negotiating commitments, and I argue that this approach applies to social talk and self talk
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