The chapters in Part III all relate, more or less closely, to the distinction between conscious and non-conscious reasoning. As before, we say a few words of general introduction, before briefly commenting on each of the essays in this part of the book.

As we noted in chapter 1, one way of weakening the cognitive conception of language is by restricting its claims along a vertical (as opposed to horizontal, domain-specific) dimension – claiming that it is only conscious thought which crucially implicates language, and allowing that non-conscious thoughts may be carried by, for example, sentences of Mentalese or patterns of activation in a connectionist network. None of the chapters in Part III take quite this straightforward line (but see Carruthers, 1996a). Yet all pay attention to distinctions between kinds, or levels, of thinking – including the distinction between conscious and non-conscious thinking. (Note that the papers by Carruthers, chapter 5, and Clark, chapter 8, could also have been positioned in Part III, since much of their focus is on the role of language in conscious thought.) And all give at least some weight to the introspective datum that for much of the time our waking lives are occupied by a stream of ‘inner speech’, in which natural language words and sentences are imaged. This is certainly one of the battle-grounds on which the debate between cognitive and communicative conceptions of language needs to be played out, in our view.