The varieties of Inner Speech worth pursuing. Foundations for a phenomenal taxonomy

Inner Speech (IS) falls within the purview of various fields of inquiry, including philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and, more recently, neuroscience. Due to the diverse aims, methodologies, and scopes across these disciplines, there exist inherent ambiguities that could impede the development of a unified research program or hinder the convergence of disparate disciplinary investigations into a cohesive whole. Therefore, in this article, my aim is to clarify the terminology, concepts, and expressions employed by scholars from different fields. I will achieve this by compiling and synthesizing appropriate theoretical and analytical proposals from contemporary IS scholars, while also subjecting a select few of these proposals to critical examination. Ultimately, I will present a fundamental taxonomy, which, nonetheless, relies on two essential postulates: (1) IS must be characterized based on its intrinsic nature of attentive conscious experience; (2) IS must be unequivocally considered as an intrinsically linguistic phenomenon.