Hearing What We’d Like to Hear: The Prima Facie View of Indirect Self-Talk

This paper provides a philosophical analysis of striking results in the science of self-talk. Subtle grammatical variations in the way we address ourselves in our inner voice—using the first-person pronoun 'I' versus the second-person pronoun 'You' or one’s own name—has distinct effects on motivation, emotion regulation, and performance, even when the content of the proposition entertained remains the same. According to the dominant explanation, indirect self-talk involves a shift in perspective that enhances psychological self-distance. In this paper, I argue that appealing to psychological distance in this context is both obscure and unexplanatory. Instead, I propose a more direct account of the effects, drawing on the Prima Facie View of perceptual imagination. I argue that the differential efficacy of indirect self-talk stems from the implicit assertoric force of auditory imagery: when we address ourselves in the second or third person, we have the prima facie impression that someone else is making a claim about us. This account builds on the cognitive architecture of imagery processing and explains the effect as arising from associative responses to grammatical structures typically used by others when addressing us.