Ayer’s Thinking and Meaning (1947, hereafter TaM) is concerned with eliminating facets of the commonly held conception of thinking. I argue that this strategy meets with stubborn resistance in the case of silent, or unspoken thoughts, which I set out to defend from elimination in this essay. Ayer’s early inclinations towards behaviouristic analysis evolved into a more charitable position, accommodating the theoretical distinguishability of inner experience from physical processes. In TaM, Ayer seeks to establish a neutral position for the mental realm by reducing the factors involved in thinking to the symbolic realm. I set out two specific arguments to demonstrate that Ayer’s attempt to address the reduction of the process of thought and the object of thought is unsuccessful in the case of unspoken thoughts. If my reasoning is sound, then the retention of processes of thought has significant implications for Ayer’s wider linguistic philosophy and indirectly supports methodologies that Ayer was implicitly opposing, such as phenomenological theories, which utilize the very acts and objects of thought Ayer aimed to eliminate in TaM.
