Adaptive behaviour is essential for robots to establish natural social interactions with humans. It is grounded and develops from an adaptive perception of the environment and the other agents. At the intersection of social and cognitive robotics, this paper theorises interpretation as a fundamental instrument to provide such skills to robots. First, the hermeneutical circle of context and experience is described as a core element of adaptivity in human perception. Second, the process of interpretation/contextualisation is presented through two different but complementary levels. Finally, in a dialogue with the current developments in social robots, the paper brings to attention some problems and possibilities on the topic.