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
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.