Language as a Bottleneck of the Self
PhilPapers (PhilPapers Foundation) February 17, 2026 Richard Csaky
This essay treats language as a paradoxical cognitive technology: a compact, lossy code that nonetheless seems to enable the felt continuity of consciousness and deliberation. I propose that inner speech is primarily a communicative act—even when its audience is oneself—because producing language requires implicitly modeling an interpreter. That recursive “communicator–interceptor” loop yields...