The cooperative principle and goal schemas

Is it possible to account for the deep intersubjectivity (“ultra-sociality”) that is special to humans, in terms of the cognitive-individual notion of goal schemas? I provide a (partially) affirmative answer to this question, through an analysis of Grice’s Cooperative Principle based on that notion. On the one hand, goal schemas have a conceptual-predicative structure that is key to understanding pragmatic inferences, but also phenomena such as the embedding of utterances in activity types, and short-circuiting of implicatures. On the other hand, by incorporating affective evaluations, goal schemas may account for the social-cultural systems of motivations that shape individual subjects — well beyond the “motivation to share” that enable joint actions.