Single actions, taken out of context, typically have numerous meanings. Yet, when we observe such actions as part of a sequence of behaviour, we are often unaware of this multiplicity of possible meanings. In this article, we argue that the specific meaning of an action is the result of a process in which people, by making appropriate inferences, relate the actions in a sequence to each other and construct a coherent scenario from them. One implication of this position is that the meaning of actions should be extremely sensitive to the order in...
