This essay will be devoted principally to the debate between two basic attitudes which one can adopt in regard to a text. These two attitudes were summed up, in the time of Wilhelm Dilthey, by the two words "explain" and "interpret." Dilthey called explanation that model of intelligibility borrowed from the natural sciences and extended to the historical sciences by the positivistic schools, and he took interpretation as a derived form of understanding in which he saw the basic approach of the "human sciences" (Geisteswissenschaften), the only one which can do justice to the basic difference between these sciences and the "natural sciences." I would like here to examine the outcome of this opposition in the light of the conflicts between contemporary schools. The notion of explanation has, indeed, shifted positions; it no longer stems from the natural sciences but from strictly linguistic models. As for the notion of interpretation, it has, in modern hermeneutics, undergone deep transformations which set it off from the psychological notion of understanding, in Dilthey's sense of the term. It is this new situation of the problem perhaps less contradictory and more fruitful, which I would like to explore. But before entering into the new concepts of explanation and interpretation, I would like to devote some time to a preliminary question which in fact will determine all the rest of our investigation. The question is this: What is a text?