| Summary: | This paper analyses the role of « interpretation » in the process of understanding the sense of an utterance from a contextualist point of view. Following the seminal work of Frege, Wittgenstein and Austin, the main thinkers of contextualism – and Charles Travis in the first place – argue that in order to understand the criteria that set the sense of an utterance, one requires to be anchored within a context. Those criteria work as a standard of correctness of the semantics properties application. However, one can wonder whether defending that the application of the semantics properties of an utterance stems from an understanding of the discriminating criteria in a given context, means that an individual speaker may interpret in a different way the sense of an utterance than an other speaker put in an otherwise same situation? The first purpose of this paper is to show, against a relativist conception of understanding, that the criteria of sense are determined by convention and, consequently, that in a context, there is just one possible interpretation of these criteria. The interpretation is determined by the context that norms it. Under these conditions, is it meaningful to discuss the “interpretation” of the sense of an utterance? The second purpose of this paper is to analyse if, locally, the understanding of the ordinary language utterances may admit one, hence several, interpretations. The paper distinguishes therefore between two process: the interpretation of the signs of language which is prominent when such signs are ambiguous; and the interpretation of the sense of an utterance which is a relevant option only in a very specific case, when the context is missing. The paper distinguishes consequently between several concepts of interpretation: interpretation as a substitution of a symbol by another one in order to translate the ambiguous utterance in ordinary language; interpretation which is not an additional process to understanding but the process of giving sense itself and whose aim is only a clarification one.
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