Thinking as subvocal behavior: is thought talking to oneself rather than a stream of inner images?

John B. Watson, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

When you "think," what are you doing? The introspectionist says you are inspecting a stream of images and ideas in an inner theater. I say you are talking to yourself. Thinking is subvocal speech — implicit laryngeal and muscular behavior, the same word-habits you use aloud, run off silently under the breath because they were driven inward when speaking aloud was punished or discouraged.

There is no inner theater and there are no images in the sense the introspectionist means; there is behavior, mostly verbal behavior, gone implicit.¹ This is not a paradox but the natural consequence of the whole position: if psychology studies behavior and not consciousness, then thought, the last refuge of the mentalist, must also be behavior, or it is nothing a science can touch.²

I locate it in the throat and the muscles because that is where it can be got at, measured, and conditioned — not in a private mental space where it can only be reported and never checked.³⁴⁵

Sources

1. For example, "I must start to build that bookcase new," or "I am shooting too high; I must aim lower." 6. That aspect of 'memory, which is supposed by the introspectionist to be difficult for the behaviorist to cope with, is merely the calling out of the verbal parallel of manual habits earlier put on.

   Behaviorism

2. As new scientific facts are discovered we have fewer and fewer phenomena which cannot be observed, hence fewer and fewer pegs upon which to hang our folk-lore. The behaviorist advances a natural science theory about thinking which makes it just as simple, and just as much a part of biolog- ical processes, as tennis playing.

   The Ways of Behaviorism

3. Not all situations which must be met by subvocal language responses are quite so severe or so dramatic. Daily you are asked such questions as, "Can you lunch with me next Thursday?"—''Would it be possible for you to take a trip to Chicago next week?"—'"Could you lend me one hundred dollars until the first of the month?"—and the like.

   Behaviorism

4. Daily you are asked such questions as, "Can you lunch with me next Thursday?"'—"Would it be possible for you to take a trip to Chicago next week?"—"Could you lend me one hundred dollars until the first of the month?"'—and the like. In accordance with our theory of thinking we would like to suggest certain definitions and propositions.

   The Ways of Behaviorism

5. Now it is this type of implicit behavior that the intro- spectionist claims as his own and denies to us because its neural seat is cortical and because it goes on without ade- quate bodily portrayal. Why in psychology the stage for ' These substitutes are discussed in detail on p. 332.

   Behavior, An Introduction to Comparative Psychology

Where the argument is made

• Behaviorism (1925, the account of thinking as implicit or subvocal laryngeal behavior — talking to oneself under the breath — and the denial of the inner image and the conscious mental theater)
• Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919, the behaviorist treatment of language and implicit response)

How the argument was received

The most radical and most vulnerable of Watson's specific claims — the reduction of thought itself to peripheral behavior. It followed inexorably from the behaviorist program (thought as the mentalist's last redoubt had to be behavior too) and it was the point at which behaviorism strained hardest against the phenomena. The peripheralist theory met a decisive experimental difficulty: thinking continues even when the speech musculature is pharmacologically paralyzed, which a strict laryngeal theory cannot accommodate. The cognitive revolution restored internal representation and mental imagery as legitimate objects of a scientific psychology, and the study of "inner speech" survived only as one component of a far richer central-process account of cognition. It stands as the clearest case of the behaviorist exclusion of the mental overreaching the facts.