Thinking About Thinking

Raymond Tallis reflexes his mind muscle.

- Raymond Tallis

Philosophers spend much of their time thinking. Sometimes they think about thinking itself. But thinking about thought is a strange business. It should be impossible, like trying to navigate a stream in a boat made out of water.

We most often characterize thinking as ‘inner speech’. ‘Speech’ because, as Bryan Magee says in his Confessions of a Philosopher (1997), we “cannot express in language what thought is like before it is translated into language.” And so, as we cock our inner ears, we hear a voice ‘in our head’ – the ‘head’ being a rather ill-defined location, but closer to the intracranial darkness behind our eyes than, say, our feet, or indeed, the rest of the universe. It is tempting to think that this imaginary sound is necessary for us to be able to inform ourselves as to what we are thinking. This hardly holds up: it suggests that we require our thoughts to be fully formed in order that we can tell ourselves what they are. We would end up having to have our thoughts before we know what thoughts we are having! At this point vertigo beckons.

All in all, thinking to ourselves seems an instance of something Ludwig Wittgenstein said was impossible: the right hand giving the left hand a gift. Let us temporarily retreat from philosophy to psychology.

Shrinks Think