Thoughts That Linger
Further reflections on inner speech (see here and here and here and here and here for earlier posts on inner speech):
Does it ever happen to you that you have a thought "in inner speech" as it were -- seemingly embodied by a sentence of English running silently through your head -- and the thought continues to linger after the inner speech has ceased? You've thought, maybe, "I shouldn't be spending so much time blogging" (not that you ever have that thought!) and for some moments after that sentence is done, you have no additional inner speech or imagery that you can discern, and yet the thought is kind of still with you?
I wore one of Hurlburt's beepers and took random samples of my daily experience (by being beeped at random intervals, then reflecting on what my experience was at the last undisturbed moment prior to the beep, as far as I could discern), and it seemed to me occasionally that I was caught in just such moments.
If this occurs, it undermines simplistic views of thought as transpiring in inner speech. The inner speech is gone, but the thought is not. In this way, it's a complement to my earlier post about interrupted inner speech, where the thought seems complete before the inner speech is.
It also raises the question of whether one could have such a "lingering thought" without the inner speech (or any other sort of imagery) preceding it at all....