Earlier, I mentioned John Dewey, who commented on Hume’s omission of inner speech when he described what he found within. For Dewey, inner speech was important but its role was largely recreational, a vehicle for storytelling. It’s odd that he did not discuss other uses. This might be because Dewey was so intensely social a philosopher; he thought that most of the important things we do take place out in the open. For Vygotsky, inner speech has a role in what is now called executive control. Inner speech gives us a way of performing actions in the right order (turn off the power first, then
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