28 SOCIAL SCIENTIST for self-evidence, this theory of reading means by self-evidence a self-evidence of the present', it imposes on a text, which comes out of a different historical milieu, critical standards of the present, as also its substantive preoccupations. If for instance we are concerned at present with a problem of periodisation, we would be entirely justified, on this view, to ask a text what it has to say on that. If texts are treated this way, the only tests they can be subjected to are one of consistency or of empirical validity of their statements about the world. This of course implies the idea, which Marxists can hardly hold with comfort, that his world and my world should be presumed to be identical. A necessary precondition for a textualist theory of reading is an eternalist view of the world, one which ignores historical change.6 Against this, contextualists contend that all meanings must be sought through a historical reconstruction of their sense (as distinct from their reference). It is a commonplace of interpretation theory that correctness in interpreting depends on reconstruction of meaning intention. To understand the meaning of an utterance is not to read it through my preoccupation but to reconstruct what the author intended to do in making the statement. In all nonostensive cases this implies a reconstruction which is historical. Contextualists do not presume intended meanings to be self-evident; but they are not ultimately mysterious. These can be recovered from evidence both internal and external to texts. Statements are messages which exist in codes. The use of codes does not imply that the meanings that they seek to convey are always unclear or subject to an ineradicable doubt. Codes form the implicit rules or conventions of a language or a culture.7 Correct explication of textual meaning depends crucially on the recovery of these conventions, by playing upon which the meaning intention of the author creates the particular exigencies of a text. Contextualists, therefore, assert that the business of reading is primarily one of contexting statements, or, to be more precise, of judging between various possible contexts as to their appositeness. But context is a vague term. When we use the notion of a context for a particular utterance, it can mean a whole range of quite different things. Contexts, one can say, are formed in layers. A sentence forms the context of a concept. If a concept does not give off an immediately clear meaning, one way of rendering it unambiguous is to see it as a part of the sentence in which it is set. A sentence needs a paragraph or argument, an argument a chapter, a chapter a text, just as a text may perhaps require an entire oeuvre in a hierarchy of contexts. Usually these contexts are considered internal, in the sense of being constitutive parts of the author's intentional design. But reconstruction of contexts also involves referring to cultural codes, linguistic norms, common presuppositions of a mode of thought, even styles of presentation. Quite possibly, an author may use some of these resources pre-reflexively? without perfect self-consciousness. These may form part of his