Summary: In order to perform effective communication, agents must be able to foresee the effects of their utterances on the addressee’s mental state. We study the consequences of an utterance on the mental state of a hearer. Given an agent communication language with a STRIPS-like semantics, we propose a set of criteria that allow the binding of the speaker’s mental state to its uttering of a certain sentence. On the basis of these criteria, we give an abductive procedure that the hearer can adopt to partially recognize the speaker’s mental state that led to a specific utterance.