Talking to oneself can seem either a perfectly daft activity or, if not that, an activity the practicality of which requires us to make some psychological suppositions we would otherwise prefer to avoid. If we know something, there will be no need to inform ourselves of it; while if we do not know it, we will have nothing to tell ourselves. Hence, it would seem, either it is perfectly pointless to tell ourselves anything or, when we talk to ourselves, the informer and the informed are somehow distinct, and one of them can know something the other does not yet know. Similarly ifwe ask ourselves a question, then unless the asker and the asked are somehow distinct, we will either know the answer, in which case there was no need to ask, or not know it, in which case it will be useless to ask.