Everyone is a reflexive being. This means that we deliberate about our circumstances in relation to ourselves and, in the light of these deliberations, we determine our own personal courses of action in society. Nevertheless we do not all exercise our reflexivity in the same way. Everyone has a domain of mental privacy from which they subjectively survey and evaluate their external circumstances, within which they savour their satisfactions or nurture their discontents, and through which they monitor their future doings. The vehicle for all of this is the internal conversation. However, the nature of our internal conversations is far from being identical and such differences exceed personal idiosyncrasies. These varying types of internal conversation are important because they are inextricably related to different forms of deliberations and, ultimately, to the kind of modus vivendi which an agent seeks to establish in the world.

Even within the small group which was interviewed, one sub-group could readily be distinguished as ‘communicative reflexives’. These are people who do indeed initiate internal dialogues in the privacy of their own minds, but that is not where they complete them. Instead, their pattern is one of ‘thought and talk’. Having raised an issue intra-personally, they seek to resolve it inter-personally. They share their problems, discuss decisions and thus externalise much of what, to other interviewees, remains intrinsically an internal deliberative process.