The exchange of ideas is often a delicate business. Readers, it is true, are sometimes capable of enhancing the understanding of a given text. Lovejoy, to give a more extreme type of claim as example, has gone as far as to suggest that ‘one does not, in most cases, adequately understand one author – does not see what was going on in him as he wrote – unless one understands him better than he understood himself’. Authors, of course, facing claims of this nature about their work, may still think otherwise, though on occasion agreeing that a receiver has understood him (i.e. his work) better than himself.

The predominant tendency, however, seems to point in the opposite direction. The transmission of ideas, as already argued (chapter 9), normally entails a certain loss of information–content and meaning, and this ‘loss or mistaking’ in the process of exchange is rarely outweighed by the reader's positive contribution to a better understanding of the message at issue. On the other hand, there is the danger of over–interpreting: ‘He who explains a passage in an author “more deeply” than the passage was meant has not explained the author but obscured him’.