Philosophers of language and theoretical linguists disagree about whether the meaning of an utterance is determined by the speaker’s more or less constrained communicative intention or by public features available to the hearer such as conventional linguistic meaning and diverse contextual cues. In this paper I question the common presupposition that there is such a thing as the correct interpretation of an utterance. I set out to show that, from the viewpoint of the three options at stake in the interpretive interaction between the speaker and the hearer, the notion of correct interpretation is dispensable. If the hearer takes an interest in the speaker’s intended meaning, as she most frequently does, she has no reason to be concerned with the actual meaning of the utterance. If the hearer wants to hold the speaker responsible for the normative consequences of the utterance, what is at issue is whether the hearer had the best reasons to take the utterance the way she did, i.e. the hearer opts for the most reasonable interpretation of the utterance, irrespective of the speaker’s intention and also of the objective meaning of the utterance. Finally, the hearer may opt for a merely imagined meaning of the utterance, which accounts for the remaining purposes a hearer can have with respect to an utterance, e.g. merriment. If there is no use for the notion of the correct interpretation of an utterance in interpretive practice, it seems that there are good reasons to dispense with this notion also in the theory about language and communication.