In comparison to Freud, a more empirically informed expression of the unconscious comes from Ray Jackendoff (1996) and his model of inner speech and attention. To Jackendoff, all thinking is unconscious. What we might folk-perceive as thought, our internal dialogue and imagery, is merely a second-order manifestation of what is happening more deeply in the brain. This is not to say that inner representations are useless or play no role in thought, but that they are not thought itself. All healthy vertebrates seem to be capable of thinking about what is in their immediate environment, and perhaps even have some internal representation via imagery. To Jackendoff, humans have the advantage of second-order phenomena expressing as words instead of just pictures, and this ability has led to our seemingly significant advantage in intelligence.
Jackendoff’s account is that we have a field (metaphorically) of consciousness and an attentional system which allows us to place more or less focus on different aspects of the conscious experience. One might pay considerable attention to just one aspect of consciousness, mostly ignoring the rest, or pay general attention to all of consciousness, with a loss of detail towards any particular part. Consciousness consists both of what is occurring in our sensory apparatus and our inner speech/imagery; attention can be paid to anything in consciousness. Our thinking, then, focuses on what we are paying attention to, and this dynamic is what makes language so powerful. That language is distinctly separate from thinking, unlike the cognitive view of language, yet acts as a tool for our thinking, unlike a pure communicative view where language only helps us share our thinking with others, is what makes his view supracommunicative.
If I wanted to think about politics but could only focus on external stimuli, I would be required to go out and sensorily experience aspects of politics to gather any insight. From these experiences it seems unlikely I would be able to develop higher-order models, a la Marx or Smith, but instead only observe basic interactions between other humans and come to identify alliances and family relationships, something other primates are also capable of doing (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1996). Via just sensory experience I can never hold in my attention the entire process of production, the psychological states of workers, or abstract concepts like the “invisible hand.” Attention is just too limited to sensorily handle that much information (Miller, 1956). Language, however, manages to pack these huge processes into tiny chunks that fit into our attentional system like a glove. Human thinking can then be applied to these broader conceptual frameworks, and we can end up with (for better or worse) free markets and dialectical materialism.
The biggest weakness in Jackendoff’s paper is that he leaves thinking as a black box, a mysterious process which has a causal role with no explanation itself. Jackendoff might protest my disagreement by citing all of cognitive science as a way to fill in this blank, but even with a cognitivist conceptualization of thinking being given, there does not seem to be an explanation for the tie between unconscious thinking and the phenomenological aspects of inner speech. How does our information processing give rise to the words in our head? This issue is not tackled.
However, if a causal link can be drawn between thinking and inner speech I think Jackendoff’s account is quite powerful. His model demystifies consciousness by claiming its identification with though is an “illusion” (Jackendoff, 1996, pg. 28) without having the claim that all of consciousness itself is an “illusion” (Dennett, 2018); demystification can be helpful in seeing subjects through a scientific lens. The inner attentional model gives an account on how language gives humans a cognitive advantage, while not dismissing other beings as having no language and therefore no thought (Descartes, 1998 [1637]). I have yet to encounter a compelling definition of “thinking” which can exclude animals from being able to think, Jackendoff does not attempt to make this leap. His theory also brings inner speech conceptually closer to sensory experience by having both be aspects of the same smaller process. This reflects how inner speech and sensory audition seem to be intrinsically tied (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015) and lets us focus in on specific parts of the brain, such as Broca’s area, to further explore the link between language and cognition.
Drawing the causal link remains a big “if” and goes far beyond the scope of this paper. I am currently investigating the Free Energy Principle, gaining traction amongst both Bayesian brain cognitivists and post-Freud psychoanalysts (Joffily & Coricelli, 2013; Friston, 2010; Solms, 2021; Connolly & van Deventer, 2017), as a way to bridge the gap between thinking and phenomena. Regardless of whether or not said inquiry is successful, Jackendoff’s work on the supracommunicative view both provides an exciting perspective on the nature of consciousness and a compelling argument for how language boosts our ability to think. I have been paying attention to the language of this paper for the last four hours and have produced a, at least relative to monkeys, complex work of high-order thought, something that would make my naïve teenage self proud. Per Jackendoff, the words in this paper are not a mere communication of my thoughts, but a tool I used to develop my thinking.
References
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