![]() 3 Among these symptoms are delusions of control, AVHs, and thought insertion. Self-monitoring accounts are often viewed as unifying accounts of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. We will use the term ‘inner speech’ in the latter sense, although nothing of substance hangs on this terminological decision, and we acknowledge that both are valid senses of the term ‘inner speech’. In the latter sense, that subtype is, or is partly constituted by, an instance of inner speech. ![]() In the former sense, the subtype of AVH that interests us is not an instance of inner speech, even though it may be generated by the processes that usually generate inner speech. By that term one can be referring either to a particular experience, with a particular phenomenology, or to a particular feature of human cognition, which makes use of particular mechanisms, say, and which sometimes gives rise to that phenomenology, but which needn't always (for example, when it is disrupted in certain ways). Given this, it makes sense to start, for the sake of inquiry, with the hypothesis that at least some AVHs are instances of pathological inner speech, and then to ask: what kind of thing must inner speech be in order for it to play this role in the generation of AVHs?īefore moving on, it is important for us to get clear on what kind of thing we are referring to by ‘inner speech’. However, it seems to us that, despite its prevalence and familiarity, the nature of inner speech is far from self-evident. Theorists tend to use inner speech (which they take to be relatively un-mysterious) to make sense of AVHs (which they take to be relatively mysterious) and not vice versa. It is worth mentioning that the order of explanatory primacy is normally the reverse of what we are doing here. Our focus in this paper is on inner speech-based AVHs, and what they tell us about inner speech more generally. In contrast, hypervigilance hallucinations involve the moulding and boosting of ambiguous environmental stimuli into voices (as such, they are strictly speaking not so much hallucinations as illusions). As the names suggest, the ‘raw materials’ for memory and inner speech-based hallucinations are episodic memories and episodes of inner speech respectively. Three identified subtypes are memory-based, inner speech-based and hypervigilance hallucinations. This has lead some theorists ( Jones, 2010 Wilkinson, 2014 Smailes et al., 2015) to claim that there are subtypes of AVHs, and that these amount to fundamentally different phenomena, underpinned by different mechanisms and different aetiologies. As a phenomenon, it varies enormously in a number of ways: in how it presents itself phenomenologically, in terms of the context in which it occurs, and arguably in what causes it. In this paper, we suggest an account of a specific instance of this, namely, a particular subtype of auditory verbal hallucination (AVH), and draw some lessons about the processes that underlie normal inner speech.Īn AVH involves, roughly, the experience of hearing a voice in the absence of anyone actually speaking. 1 But what is inner speech, and what happens in unconscious processing that makes it the conscious experience that it is? A clue to answering this can be found in cases where the mechanisms that produce inner speaking behave unusually. ![]() Inner speech is a pervasive feature of our conscious lives.
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