p.5 This paper argues that American pragmatism, usually viewed as an action-based or practical theory of meaning, should also be regarded as a theory of inner speech or the dialogical self.

p.9 we are faced with two distinct acts of choice. One is to choose the internal model, the inner speech scenario that looks best to us. This is already a pre-choice or a preparation for action. Then we choose which action to follow in the world of external behavior. This is choice in the usual sense of the word. But the prechoice of the inner speech selection is a causal factor in how we eventually choose to act.

p.9-10 My point then is that Peirce re-introduced inner speech into the history of thought (Archer, 2003, p. 65). For him most thought was in inner speech, and by and large cognition was conducted within the medium of the internal conversation. But within this larger function, he emphasized the power of agency and the moral leverage that inner speech could bring.

p.10 Here is Mead's version of the internal conversation.
Thinking is a process of conversation with one's self when the individual takes the attitude of the other, especially when he takes the common attitude of the whole group, when the symbol that he uses is a common symbol, has a meaning common to the entire group, to everyone who is in it and to anyone who might be in it. ...There is a field, a sort of inner forum, in which we are the only spectators and the only actors. In that field each one of us confers with himself. He asks and answers questions. He develops his ideas and arranges and organizes those ideas as he might do in conversation with somebody else. (Mead, 1936, pp. 380-381, 401.)

p.12 Like the other pragmatists, Dewey thought inner speech was a way of solving problems without overtly carrying out a trial and error process. This ability developed in evolution and it was the distinctive human process, i.e. the key to human intelligence. As Dewey explained it:
...deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action. It starts from the blocking of efficient overt action...Then each habit, each impulse, involved in the temporary suspension of overt action takes its turn in being tried out. Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like. But the trial is in imagination, not in overt fact (1930, p. 190).

p.13 Herbert Blumer also discussed inner speech, referring to it as "self interaction." He sees all action as directed and guided by inner speech. As he says:
By virtue of self-interaction the human being becomes an acting organism coping with situations in place of being an organism merely responding to the play of factors. And his action becomes something he constructs and directs to meet the situations in place of an unrolling of reactions evoked from him. (1969, p. 73).
In relation to the determinism of human action he says
Yet, one must consider the contention that the process of self interaction has an intrinsic character or logic that prevents the resulting action from fitting into a determinist framework. (quoted in Athens, 1993, p. 171)

p.14 all human action, not just the more deliberate variety, is guided by inner speech.