Our conscious thought, at least at times, seems suffused with language. We may experience thinking as if we were “talking in our head”, thus using inner speech to verbalize, e.g., our premises, lemmas, and conclusions. I take inner speech to be part of a larger phenomenon I call inner semiotics, where inner semiotics involves the subjective experience of expressions in a semiotic (or symbol) system absent the overt articulation of the expressions. In this paper, I argue that inner semiotics allows us to bootstrap our way into entertaining thoughts about exact numbers and quantities that we couldn't prior to our competence with a numeric code. I establish that our arithmetic thoughts literally occur as (internal ‘articulations’ of) expressions in a numeric code. However, a problem arises for my view: just as we can slip in overt speech, producing an utterance that deviates from what we mean to say, there is very good evidence that we can slip in inner speech as well. If our arithmetic thought occurs in a numeric code, it's far from clear how we determine when a covert utterance constitutes a slip. In closing, I provide an account of what makes an inner speech utterance a slip.

中文翻译：

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头脑中的符号学：思考并通过符号思考

我们的意识思维，至少有时，似乎充满了语言。我们可能会经历“在头脑中说话”的思考，从而使用内心言语来表达，例如我们的前提、引理和结论。我将内在言语视为一个更大现象的一部分，我称之为内在符号学，其中内在符号学涉及符号（或符号）系统中表达的主观体验，而没有表达的公开表达。在本文中，我认为内在符号学使我们能够引导我们对精确的数字和数量进行有趣的思考，这是我们在掌握数字代码之前无法做到的。我确定我们的算术思想实际上是作为数字代码中的表达式（的内部“表达”）出现的。然而，我的观点出现了一个问题：正如我们可以在公开言语中犯错，产生偏离我们本意的话语一样，有充分的证据表明我们也可以在内心言语中犯错。如果我们的算术思维出现在数字代码中，那么我们如何确定秘密话语何时构成失误还很不清楚。最后，我将说明是什么导致了内心言语的失误。