March 15 - “The Voice Inside Our Head: Responsibility, Control, and Inner Speech”, a talk by Wade Munroe

Join us for “The Voice Inside Our Head: Responsibility, Control, and Inner Speech”, a talk by Wade Munroe (U. Michigan, Ann Arbor) on Friday, March 15 from 4:00-6:00 PM (MDT) in Philosophy Department seminar room (Assiniboia Hall 2-02A) or on Zoom.

Everyone is welcome!

Abstract: We typically hold people responsible for what they say aloud, but what about when it comes to our inner speech, that is, our silent ‘self-talk’ or ‘inner monologue’? In this talk, I examine our responsibility (or lack thereof) for what we say in our heads. I advance an account of the type of control we exert over inner speech that helps to illuminate and destigmatize various forms of intrusive inner speech, especially that which possesses a morally distressing or socially taboo content.

While most people experience occasional intrusive inner speech, it occurs with greater frequency in persons with certain mental health conditions, like obsessive-compulsive, perinatal mood, and anxiety disorders. When experienced by these populations, intrusive thoughts are more difficult to dismiss, because their frequency is often (as I argue, mistakenly) taken to reflect the person’s intentions. In the first half of the talk, I argue that inner speech is rarely intentional. Because our inner speech is not reflective of our intentions, it may seem that, prima facie, we are not morally responsible for it. Yet, as I argue in the second half of the talk, our intuitions about the moral status of unintended speech will likely be more complicated than this. Our moral assessments of inner speech will depend on our moral assessments of the attitudes that cause the speech (and the types of control we possess over these attitudes). In closing, I examine accounts of the causal source of our intrusive self-talk and argue that, despite its potentially distressing content, we are not morally blameworthy for our intrusive inner speech.

Speaker: Wade Munroe is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and the Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Michigan. His work lies at the intersections of the philosophy of cognitive science, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. His central research examines the relationship between language and cognitive control, with a special focus on the moral and functional dimensions of inner speech, that is, our ‘internal monologue’ that accompanies much of our thinking.

Zoom ID: 920 6023 5649

Passcode: 470504