ABSTRACT
The intelligibility of the text Because we have read our masters, we are already familiar with the distinction between saying and showing.1 So whatever a text says is sustained or undermined by what it shows. What it shows is the intelligibility of its claim. We are used to two such claims. According to one claim, that of objectivity, a text expresses the world. To be sure, since we are all neo-Kantians, this ‘objective’ text does not present itself as the world itself (literally, as the speech of the world), but as an expression of our common forms of language and representation. In the terms of the later Wittgenstein, the ‘objective text’ claims to speak our grammar and defer to our form of life.2
