Gilbert Ryle's Secret Grotto
Gilbert Ryle, in his justly famous 1949 book The Concept of Mind, downplayed the importance of inner events to our mental lives, emphasizing instead patterns of behavior. (See, for example, the IEP entry on Behaviorism.)
Yet Ryle does not (despite his reputation) deny the existence of an inner mental life altogether. He admits, for example, the existence of "silent monologues" (p. 184), silent tunes in one's head (p. 269), "thrills and twinges" of emotion (p. 86 and many other places), "private" visual images (p. 34), and the like. Daydreams and silent soliloquoys, he says, belong among things we can catch ourselves engaged in, much as we can catch ourselves scratching or speaking aloud to ourselves. Such events, he continues, "can be private or silent items" of our autobiography (p. 166-167) to which only we have access, and he sometimes explicitly characterizes them as "in our heads".
Such remarks may surprise some who are used to hearing Ryle characterized (or caricatured) as a radical behaviorist who denies that the terms of ordinary English can ever refer to private episodes. Although Ryle derides the general importance of inner, ghostly "shadow actions" (p. 25) in a "secret grotto" (p. 119), and repeatedly denies the necessity of their occurrence prior to outward actions, he plainly does allow the existence, and even the occasional importance, of private mental events.
This seems to me exactly the right view. We do have a sort of "secret grotto": We can (in some sense) witness our own silent utterances, visual imagery, daydreams, and twinges of emotion, in a way others cannot. Yet it's not clear that our noticing such events in the "stream of experience" gives us any generally privileged self-knowledge beyond the kind of privilege that anyone might have who can witness some things that others cannot (say what takes place when one is alone in a room); and indeed we may not actually be very accurate witnesses. Nor is it clear that inner speech is any more important, or necessary to thought, than outer speech; or that the twinges we feel are the most important or central fact about suffering an emotion; or that it's an any way important to most of our goals to be in touch with the happenings in this inner grotto.
And that's why it's fine, on my view, that we are so little in touch with them, and so badly.
Part of me is attracted to an externalist, embodied, view of the mind. There's something I'm suspicious of in talking about our experience as "inner". And yet I'm not sure the metaphor of spatial interiority (and maybe a metaphor is all it is) is so bad, if it's just meant to capture the kind of privacy that even Ryle seems to allow.