Langage intérieur et origine de la conscience. Le cas de Tran Duc Thao

Although the inner language is a fundamental given of inner life, and even though experimental research on the inner language and its functions becomes more and more sophisticated, philosophy of mind has rarely taken seriously the linguistic nature of consciousness. In a similar way, in the recent philosophical debate on the “mind-body problem” and the “hard problem of consciousness”, the role of language hardly ever comes up for discussion except in the form of “language of thought”. However, the philosophical study of the phenomenon could make it possible to overcome the limits of the two options that orient this theoretical field, physicalism and dualism. In the following pages, we will examine the case of Tran-Duc-Thao’s (1917-1993) philosophical reflection on the inner language in his Investigations into the Origins of Language and Consciousness (1973), in which the author gives to language and its internalization a central role in the formation of consciousness.