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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
A common understanding of talking holds that at some point a conception or intent is formed in the mind of a speaker or potential speaker to say something or to use some word or construction, and that the talk that is eventually produced is an expression or realization of that intent, with something having occurred between conception and birth (I suppose we might call it “gestation”) that converts the intent or conception into the form in which it emerges from the mouth.
This notion of talking has informed the professional literature as well. William James, for example, writes:
And has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore; and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything! Linger, and the words and things come into the mind; the anticipatory intention, the divination is there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them successively and calls them right if they agree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if they do not. […]
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