Substantively we know very little about the internal conversation. The American pragmatists alone took a sustained interest in it and yet they were less than generous with examples of it. Since they held the phenomenon of inner dialogue to be universal, because it represented thought itself, they assumed that all readers could and would furnish their own instances. This both entails and also secretes the presumption that our inner dialogues are similar in kind. Yet there is no warrant for presupposing such uniformity. Even if the exercise of dialogical reflexivity is essential to the normal functioning of human beings, and even if it is a transcendentally necessary condition for the existence of society (both of these propositions being endorsed here), it does not follow that we converse with ourselves in a common way.

Similarly, in its quest for general principles of thought, experimental psychology has extended and secreted the same presumption about the common form taken by human reflexivity. Since the main potential sources of variation in people's thinking to have received sustained investigation are those broadly associated with either brain damage (various) or stages of mental development, both overtly appeal to norms and thus again presume universal processes. Moreover, within the psychology of thought, its typical experimental designs reinforce this presumption of universalism by setting the same laboratory task for all subjects and then registering the effects of imposing secondary tasks, introducing controlled stimuli and other environmental variations.