1 Forthcoming in: Inner Speech, Langland-Hassan & Vicente, eds., OUP. This is a late-stage draft. Comments welcome. From Introspection to Essence: The Auditory Nature of Inner Speech * Peter Langland-Hassan University of Cincinnati 1. Introduction Inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component. To some this claim is a truism, a platitude of common sense. To others, it is an empirical hypothesis with accumulating support (Loevenbruk et al., this volume). To yet others it is a false dogma (Gauker, 2011, this volume). I defend the claim in this chapter, confining it to adults with ordinary speech and hearing. To those already convinced that inner speech has an auditory-phonological component, I urge caution and patience. For it is one thing to assert that inner speech often, or even typically, has an auditory-phonological component—quite another to propose that it always does. When forced to argue for the stronger point, we stand to make a number of interesting discoveries about inner speech itself and about our means for discriminating it from other psycholinguistic phenomena. Establishing the stronger conclusion also provides new leverage on debates concerning how we should conceive of, diagnose, and explain auditory verbal hallucinations and “inserted thoughts” in schizophrenia. Or so I will argue in this chapter’s final section. In saying that inner speech always has an auditory-phonological component, I mean to say that it has sensory character tied to the auditory modality—and to phonemes in particular. 1 Phonemes are the *Special thanks to Agustín Vicente, Fernando Martínez-Manrique, Franz Knappik, Jordan Ochs, and Daniel Gregory for critical comments that improved this chapter. 1 I won’t offer a tight definition of what it is to have sensory character. My own view is that a mental state’s having sensory character is just a matter of its representing certain properties of the world in a fine-grained, nonconceptual manner, distinctive of some sense modality. But other views that reject a strong connection between a mental state’s