Introduction

Abstract

The late Chaïm Perelman reminded us that all speech is directed towards an audience.¹ Perelman, of course, was primarily concerned with the techniques of argumentation used in a public arena, but it does no injustice to his basic thesis to take the notion of “speech” in its broadest sense so as to include within it any mental activity which is carried on in something like a verbal form. This would, of course, include what Perelman called “self-deliberation” or indeed anything that we would be prepared to call thinking. It is hard to imagine how we could think without some sort of language that would serve as the medium of our thinking.² The language could be purely symbolic, such as would be the case if we were thinking in a mathematical idiom or in a musical notation. If we are sane our thinking follows the same patterns and logical structures as does our conscious verbal speech. We are all familiar with thinking out loud, and nobody thinks that thinking out loud is somehow different from just thinking Certainly when we try to describe our thoughts, we can only do so in a verbal form. Indeed, there is the even more basic point captured by Charles Taylor’s observation that “[t]o study human beings is to study beings who only exist in, or are partly constituted by, a certain language.”³ Obviously then, if all speech is directed towards an audience and if thinking is a type of speech act, even our thoughts are audience directed. But who is the audience to whom our thoughts are addressed and is there more than one such audience? Is this audience or are these audiences the same as those we address when we are actually speaking to other people?