and also what I'm not

Today I learned this:

“Another way to put this would be to say that neither reading of the question — which we might for convenience’s sake label as “Is there a text in this class?” — would be immediately available to any native speaker of the language.  “Is there a text in this class?” is interpretable or readable only by someone who already knows what is included under the general rubric of “first day of class” (what concerns animate students, what bureaucratic matters must be attended to before instruction begins) and who therefore hears the utterance under the aegis of that knowledge, which is not applied after the fact but is responsible for the shape the fact immediately has.  To someone whose consciousness is not already informed by that knowledge, “Is there a text in this class?” would be just as unavailable as “Is there a text in this class?” would be to someone who was not already aware of the disputed issues in contemporary literary theory.  I am not saying that for some readers or hearers the question would be wholly unintelligible (indeed…I will be arguing that unintelligibility, in the strict or pure sense, is an impossibility), but that there are readers or hearers for whom the intelligibility of the question would have neither of the shapes it had, in a temporal succession, for my colleague.”

I mean, sure.

Wait, there’s a colleague?