Abstract
Inner Speech and the Dialogical Self, by Norbert Wiley, is a welcome addition to the literature on inner speech. This literature is quite sparse outside of a limited number of fields, including developmental psychology, literacy studies, and second language research (plus a few highly specialized areas such as Bakhtinian literacy studies), where it has been a recurrent topic, especially in the Lev Vygotsky-inspired lineage. In social and cognitive psychology, sociology, and philosophy of mind, however, inner speech has not been at the forefront, especially in recent decades. This is reflective of the position that is still prevalent and recently on the rise in many mainstream frameworks—that speech is hardly central to investigations into what constitutes the core forms of human subjectivity such as the mind and self. Indeed, these frameworks, especially in psychology, are still predominantly focused on isolated individuals acting and developing each as a sui generis, independent entity hardly dependent on relational processes such as speech. This position is in stark contrast with approaches that focus on people in ever-changing relations to their world, which constitute the core of the human condition rather than one among many types of processes (i.e., the so-called “second psychology”; see Cahan and White 1992).
It is these gaps in traditional approaches and the resulting lack of emphasis on inner speech that makes Wiley’s book timely and important. He succeeds in presenting a comprehensive theory that brings inner speech and its dynamics solidly into the realm of major debates about human mind and self. Writing within the pragmatist tradition, yet expanding it with social theorizing by George Herbert Mead, the author successfully brings across the message about the extraordinarily important role of inner speech. Wiley also draws on Russian voices and thus opens ways to explore similarities and complementarities across major frameworks developed on the cusp of and early in the twentieth century—pragmatism, social interactionism, Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory, and Bakhtin’s dialogism. Such explorations across the key positions, including worldview-level premises, have been sorely missing (cf. Stetsenko 2008), and Wiley should be credited for his wide-ranging approach that begins to bridge these gaps. This is fittingly in sync with his stated position on the self and mind as processes characterized by openness to dialogues, the meshing of various voices, and an “omniscopic vision” that draws ideas together rather than separates them.
The author’s conclusions are grounded in an in-depth theorizing about the nature of reality, self, and truth, expanding on his previous work such as The Semiotic Self. Among these conclusions is the idea that thought is largely in the form of talk and the triadic reflexivity “I-you-me” (a synthesis of ideas from Mead and Peirce) reveals how the thought medium works. According to Wiley, the works of Vygotsky and Bakhtin can be recruited to illustrate this idea since they provide “actual data” on inner speech, from explorations into one’s own inner speech (Vygotsky) and the inner dialogues of Dostoevsky’s characters (Bahktin). Wiley’s underlying message is clear: “reading, thought, decision making, self-regulation, action, memory, and conversation all . . . depend on inner speech” (p.179).
These are sound conclusions and interesting illustrations meriting attention by scholars across disciplines including sociology. Yet there are aspects of Wiley’s account that deserve critical scrutiny. He draws on Vygotsky and Bakhtin in ways that tap into some of their ideas on inner speech while only scratching the surface (especially in Vygotsky’s case) of their broad conceptual systems. This is understandable for an author who appears to be somewhat new to the legacies of these scholars with their extraordinarily complex, conceptually multifaceted, and philosophically sophisticated (and partly implicit) texture and layers. Even within the Vygotskian scholarship, many interpretations focus on his theory’s fragmented though important aspects, such as cultural mediation, rather than on its underlying worldview and overarching conceptual system (for recent exceptions, see Derry 2013).
Importantly, what is left aside by Wiley is Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s paradigmatic shift away from conventional premises about human development, mind, and self. Going with the surface of Vygotsky and Bakhtin’s ideas instead of gauging their breadth and depth is unfortunate because a deeper engagement could have radicalized Wiley’s core premises. He comes up against the now-popular view that the self does not exist since, presumably, it cannot be conceived as part of the natural world within materialism that entails that everything must be embedded in physical properties. He presents a strong rebuttal, arguing that if the self is reduced, either downwardly to its biology or upwardly to its language and culture, it loses its sui generis reality—and therefore its ontological claim to rights. This, according to Wiley, is untenable for various reasons, including that much of social life and human interaction is based in precisely such rights and other social conventions and meanings that we de facto live in and rely on. Wiley also argues resolutely against a “double truth” epistemology that splits reality into physical and sociocultural worlds.
These are assumptions composing a set offundamental predicates about human condition and development. The continuing importance of debates on these assumptions is hard to overestimate. However, while sharing the core direction of Wiley’s arguments, a deeper engagement with the works of Vygotsky and Bakhtin could have moved these arguments forward even more resolutely. This is where the paradigmatic shift that can be inferred from Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s works comes into play.
This shift can be described as a transition from a relational to a transformative worldview premised on a uniquely ethical onto-epistemology (see a line of works recently summarized in Stetsenko 2016). In this interpretation, the grounding of human existence for Bakhtin and Vygotsky has to do with individuals acting in the world shared with others—and specifically, acting as social agents who neither merely dwell in nor passively contemplate and dialogue about the world. Instead, human beings co-create and co-author the world together with others (including but not exclusively through dialogues) by contributing to its collective dynamics, each from a unique position.
It is exactly through this creative process of co-authoring the world, via mattering in community practices, that people are simultaneously co-authoring themselves and becoming individually unique. The duality of reality and human existence in this case is radically challenged and replaced with the notion of a unified (though not uniform) and ceaseless (though not without contradictions), dynamic, and open-ended process ofa collective world-and-self production. Importantly, this process is “more-than-material” in that it encompasses and overcomes the dualities of subjective versus objective, external versus internal, and mind versus body by positing these as the poles on the same continuum of a creative process though which the world and people are co-constituted in a bidirectional spiral of mutual becoming.
This position is compatible with Wiley’s idea that a variety of influences come together to shape the self, yet it is the dialogical process itself that matters—if the dialogical process is expansively understood as a productive world-forming and history-making process beyond, though encompassing, dialogues. To conclude, Wiley’s major contribution is perhaps in his broad orientation to theorizing inclusive of various approaches, dialogism, and omniscopic vision. This is what researchers typically working within the confines of their home-grown traditions and habitual methodologies can learn from Wiley.