A naturalistic explanation of communication across cultures

In order to understand how communication works across cultures, it is no longer possible to “naturalize” meaning presupposing that the human mind behaves like a “black box”, where intelligence is completely determinate by external linguistic-conceptual schemes every language, or more broadly, every culture owns. The very idea of the existence of radically divergent conceptual schemes entails the absence of a relation of equivalence among sentences in different languages. If there is a difference between conceptual schemes, it could concern the cultural access we have to the world, but, at any rate, we need to share this world and some cognitive capacities. The human mind owns its own structures that cannot be ignored in order to explain the fact that language depends on the creativity of a rich and articulated mind. Consequently, communication can be considered an inferential practice that involves the specific human capacity of mind-reading, a natural ability of intuitively attributing mental states to others and to oneself. In intercultural communication, translation is nothing but a kind of metarepresentation based on an interpretive and context-dependent use of language.