-- "the act of making your thoughts, feelings, etc., known by speech, writing, or some other method"
Notice the word "known" in the middle of this definition. Known by whom? The person expressing the ideas already knows them. Therefore by definition one is making oneself known to a second party, someone other than the speaker.
... and internal verbalization is also often considered as a form of expression ...
Not as the word is defined and commonly understood.
Sure you are. When speaking internally people set up a "mirror" of themselves, speaking as if to another person (despite any internal pronoun use like "I").
If someone yells something in the forest, they are speaking to, variously, a personification of nature, the world, a god, themselves (as described above), or perhaps more literally an imagined companion.
Expression is not about the effect but the intent, even if it's subconscious.
-- which doesn't have a widely accepted resolution. The tl;dr: arguing that another hypothetical person is present by reference to the mind, is a non-starter, except among psychologists.
Comments
No, because this fails the definition of "expressing yourself". An expression is defined as --
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/expression
-- "the act of making your thoughts, feelings, etc., known by speech, writing, or some other method"
Notice the word "known" in the middle of this definition. Known by whom? The person expressing the ideas already knows them. Therefore by definition one is making oneself known to a second party, someone other than the speaker.
Not as the word is defined and commonly understood.
Sure you are. When speaking internally people set up a "mirror" of themselves, speaking as if to another person (despite any internal pronoun use like "I").
If someone yells something in the forest, they are speaking to, variously, a personification of nature, the world, a god, themselves (as described above), or perhaps more literally an imagined companion.
Expression is not about the effect but the intent, even if it's subconscious.
Your explanation would require resolution of the mind-body problem --
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem
-- which doesn't have a widely accepted resolution. The tl;dr: arguing that another hypothetical person is present by reference to the mind, is a non-starter, except among psychologists.