Thought, language, and inner speech : a reply to Ulrike Pompe-Alama

Abstract

Pompe-Alama’s commentary raises interesting issues regarding the nature of thought and its relation to language. She underlines the evolutionary relationship we have to other animals and results from cognitive science to argue that human thought is probably not fundamentally linguistic, and notes that the pull of the phenomenal experience of inner speech may mislead us into thinking it is. While I agree with these claims, I disagree that Davidson’s own arguments are predicated on an inner speech view, and raise problems for the idea that functional imaging will easily resolve the debate about the relation of thought and language.