This multidisciplinary study explores how people make sense of each other's actions.

Alessandro Duranti is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

1. Rethinking anti-intentionalism; 2. Intentions in speaking and acting: the Standard Theory and its foes; 3. The avoidance of intentional discourse: a Samoan case study; 4. The invention of promising in the Samoan translation of the Bible; 5. Intentionality and truth, revisited; 6. Speaker intentions and the role of the audience in a political campaign in the US; 7. A dialogue on intentions; 8. Opacity of other minds: local theories revisited; 9. Intentions and their modifications: a lesson from Husserl; 10. A sense of the other: from intentionality to intersubjectivity; 11. The intentional continuum.