From the interpreter’s side: Towards a unified cognitive model of interpretation

Building on recent developments in Relevance Theory, especially the distinction between basic and mentalistic ostension, this paper develops an interpreter-centered account of human communication. My central claim is that attributing intentions is not a constitutive requirement for interpretation. Rather, interpretation should be modeled in terms of the representations and operations available to the interpreter, while hypotheses about speaker intentions enter only as further constraints when relevant. On this view, interpretation is not restricted to selected addressees, but also includes readers, viewers, overhearers, eavesdroppers, and other audiences who engage with communicative stimuli without necessarily being explicitly targeted. Interpretive processing operates on perceptually and cognitively available inputs, including both deliberate public displays and symptomatic evidence. Deliberate displays need only be recognized, at a minimal level, as artifacts, non-reflex stimuli produced by an agent, without requiring any privileged access to the communicator’s specific intentions. I propose a two-layer processing architecture: a basic, non-mentalistic layer that integrates heterogeneous inputs into a unified representational format and yields a fuzzy set of assumptions; and a higher, mentalistic layer that involves more sophisticated forms of intention attribution, together with epistemic and emotional vigilance. The output is a fuzzy set of mental representations that may include overtly communicated content, weakly manifest assumptions, affective responses, public commitments, and evaluations of the communicator and the situation. The proposal thus preserves central relevance-theoretic insights while broadening the scope of pragmatics and offering a more psychologically realistic account of interpretation across communicative settings. • Interpretation extends beyond chosen addressees, as relevance is interpreter-centered. • Interpretation relies on the interpreter’s resources, not on access to intentions. • Interpretation works at two levels: basic and mentalistic; mentalizing is optional. • Interpretation operates on fuzzy sets of organized, compositional representations.