This probability is adjusted up if the person you are speaking to is known for being extremely literal and adjusted down if they are known for using figurative speech(although that last sentence should be fairly obvious, I throw it in for the sake of completeness)" to your thesis.

Exactly. I think my thesis covers that in saying "Depending on how confident you are in your interpretation". I don't explicitly talk about how do the interpretation because:

1. It's usually easy enough to assign a good confidence level to your interpretation. With a good confidence level you could cater your response properly. Ie. If you're 99% confident, say, "I think you're trying to say this". If you're 50% confident you could say, "I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but I think that it may be A, B or C.".

2. It's outside of the scope of this article. Perhaps I could mention a few guidelines, but a) it's really a very intuitive thing, b) I don't know much about that topic (how to interpret), and c) I sense that it'd be rather involved to go over how to interpret, and that the benefit isn't worth it because it's something that most people could do well enough intuitively.