Defining interpretation, and establishing a framework for it

According to a LessWrong post, we've been defining 'interpretation' wrong. When you read 'the cat ran to Patagonia,' you're not thinking about what the words mean in some abstract sense. You're retrieving mental concepts, imagining the scene, and evaluating it—wondering why a cat would do that. That's the actual phenomenon, and it's not what dictionaries claim. The author points out genuine ambiguities in how we use the term: you can interpret a text, a person's behavior, an ideology, even why your team is winning. Interpretation can stem from direct evidence or secondhand sources. It's sometimes a narrow understanding—how you think someone will act—and sometimes much broader. The proposed framework: interpretation is the subset of an agent's cognitive model relevant to understanding something. It's not a fixed thing you extract from a text; it's the particular part of what you think that matters for making sense of it right now.

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