The conception [of the historical-critical edition] excludes correcting an authorized witness document from another witness document. The result would be a contaminated text, or a version consisting of variants which though authorized, were authorized in different contexts, and which in the new context would form a new, unauthorized version that never existed historically and that the author never knew as a version. Such a ‘corrected’ version would be an unverifiable whole that even the editor as its producer could not vouch for either on the understanding of the whole as a concatenation of signs referring to one another, or in consideration of the notion that this structure changes with each variant.