Human beings talk to themselves; sometimes out-loud, other times in inner speech. In this paper, I present a resolution to the following dilemma that arises from self-talk. If self-talk exists then either, (i) we know what we are going to say and self-talk serves no communicative purpose, and must serve some other purpose, or (ii) we don’t know what we are going to say, and self-talk does serve a communicative purpose, namely, it is an instance of us communicating with ourselves. Adopting (i) was the strategy taken by Bart Geurts, who claims that the primary purpose of self-talk is to entrain commitments, and is not (primarily) communicative. While accepting that self-talk can usefully play this role, I criticise the view that entraining commitments is self-talk’s fundamental role. I argue that adopting the view that we are self-blind, at least to a significant degree, means that we can accept that self-talk does play a communicative role.

人类自言自语；有时大声，有时在内心讲话。在本文中，我针对以下由自我对话引起的困境提出了解决方案。如果自言自语存在，那么要么，（i）我们知道我们要说什么，而自言自语没有交流的目的，必须有其他目的，要么（ii）我们不知道我们要说什么，而自言自语确实起到了交流的作用，也就是说，它是我们与自己交流的一个例子。采用 (i) 是 Bart Geurts 采取的策略，他声称自我对话的主要目的是促成承诺，而不是（主要）交流。虽然接受自我对话可以有效地发挥这一作用，但我批评了这种观点，即引导承诺是自我对话的基本作用。我认为接受我们是自盲的观点，