In conclusion, contract interpretation can be briefly described as the understanding of the “meaning” of a contract and of rights and obligations that are created by it. Accordingly, the first aim in this book was to understand the notion of “contractual meaning”. Instead of examining this notion as a linguistic or philosophical concept, this book has focused on it in the sense of the “meaning attached to contractual clauses by contracting parties”.

From this perspective, there are three definitions of “contractual meaning” traditionally put forward in the literature. When we enumerate them from the most “objective” to the most “subjective” one, we can say that the textualist approach gives us the most objective definition, which is: “That to which either party ought to be referring according to the common and ordinary usage of the words”. It should be noted that we do not discuss here the meaning that each party ought to refer to by the application of overriding legal rules such as any application of the principle of good faith and fair dealing. As a result, from this point of view, the notion of “party intent”, whether “actual” or “presumed”, is not taken into consideration in ascertaining contractual meaning and the contract is understood as the written document.

It must be noted here that language is not as objective as it is generally presumed to be, as all understanding of language is necessarily construed against contextual background knowledge. When, for instance, the author of an utterance uses the sentence “blue bicycle”, he/she necessarily refers to background information on the color called “blue” and the object called “bicycle.” Accordingly, in order to“ understand” this sentence, the listener would need to have the knowledge of that background information. When we communicate or understand language, we oft en think that the other party shares the same background knowledge while it might not always be the case. A “common or ordinary meaning ” of language is thus a very debatable concept.