Abstract
The universal validity of the personalist view of meaning as owned by the individual speaker and exclusively defined by his intentions is here questioned on the basis of an analysis of spontaneous verbal interaction in a politico-judiciary arena in a traditional village in Western Samoa. After relating the Samoan practice of language understanding to the Samoan notions of self and task, it is suggested that the Samoans' use of language in social interaction is more easily understood on the basis of a dialogical, interpretive, and socio-historically oriented theory of meaning than on the basis of a ‘rationalistic’ view in which the individual is the sole originator of knowledge and evidence.
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