Developing mental abilities by representing intentionality

Communication by shared meaning, the mastery of word semantics, metareprese ntation and metamentation are mental abilities, uniquely human, that share a sense of intentionality or reference. The latter is developed by a naive psychology or interpretation - a competence dedicated to representing inten tional relations between conspecifics and the world. The idea that interpre tation builds new mental abilities around a sense of reference is based on three lines of analysis - conceptual, psychological and evolutionary. The c onceptual analysis reveals that a sense of reference is at the heart of the abilities in question. Psychological data track tight developmental correl ations between interpretation and the abilities it designs. Finally, an evo lutionary hypothesis looks at why interpretation designed those new abiliti es around a sense of reference.