 “Textualism” in contract law can be defined as the view that (a) contractual obligations stem from the objective meaning of the parties’ speech acts, (b) writings trump oral communication, and (c) a text’s meaning must be inferred from a restricted evidence-base. “Contextualists,” by contrast, favor considering prior and contemporaneous oral agreements, which might help interpret, add to, or even vary the terms of a writing. There are good reasons in favor of either textualist or contextualist approaches to fixing meaning, relating to the costs of drafting in the shadow of various interpretive regimes, the costs of litigating meaning, and the temptations that parties face to make opportunistic claims about what their contracts require. But textualists and contextualists sometimes—and much less plausibly—cast their positions as required by basic and very general features of language.