Questions of intentionality and truth are constant worries in the daily work of constructing hypotheses about the intellectual focus and social behavior of the people ethnographers study. The very process of doing ethnography often implies asking ourselves and others questions regarding possible motivations, beliefs, explanations, and consequences of actions. It is around notions of truth and intentionality, and their relation to responsibility, that we are likely to feel different from the people we live with and study. And it is through the discussion of these dimensions that we come to define the uniqueness of others' ways of being-in-the-world. When we look for traces of these interpretive processes in anthropological writings, however, we find little information or discussion. Ethnographies rarely give us the amount of detail needed to assess exactly how truth was defined, agency represented, intentions taken into consideration, or responsibilities assessed. At best, we are given summaries of some of these processes, but-as lamented by dialogical anthropologists (cf. Tedlock 1983) and cognitive anthropologists (cf. Sperber 1985)-the inferential processes remain hidden, and the data on which generalizations are based are not available for scrutiny. At the same time, such analytical concepts as truth, interpretation, and intentionality are hardly discussed in the ethnographic literature. The relationship between people, their thoughts, and their actions is a major topic of ethnographic description, but anthropologists tend to avoid philosophical discussions about such relationships. Confronted with what they consider too abstract and culturally deprived characterizations of human thought and human action, most ethnographers tend to stay away from debates about philosophy of mind or philosophy of language. Thus, for instance, the enthusiasm with which many anthropologists greeted the publication of Austin's (1962) work on speech as social action faded in the face of subsequent failure by contemporary philosophers of language to engage in the analysis of socioculturally situated speech exchanges and by the anthropologists' reluctance to extend their discussions to philosophical debates in the humanities or in the cognitive sciences. The more recent interest among cultural and linguistic anthropologists in Vygotsky's (1978) work on the social origins of cognitive processes