Marco Mazzone

It has been proposed that intentional actions are supplied by a generative system of the sort described by Chomsky for language. In this paper I aim to provide a closer analysis of this claim for the sake of conceptual clarification. To this end, I will first clarify what is involved in the thesis of a structural analogy between language and action, and then I will consider what kind of evidence there seems to be in favour of the thesis of a neurobiological identity. On this basis, I will subsequently focus on two definitional issues. The first is whether, as the claim of a generative system for intentional action suggests, humans may perform an infinite number of possible actions. The second is whether, as the claim of a generative system for intentional action suggests, what is at issue is conscious planning of action and therefore controlled processing

The notion of schema has been given a major role by Recanati within his conception of primary pragmatic processes, conceived as a type of associative process. I intend to show that Recanati’s considerations on schemata may challenge the relevance theorist’s argument against associative explanations in pragmatics, and support an argument in favor of associative (versus inferential) explanations. More generally, associative relations can be shown to be schematic, that is, they have enough structure to license inferential effects without any appeal to genuine inferential processes. Associative processes are thus able to explain a number of pragmatic and linguistic phenomena which have instead been thought to require specialized inferential processes.