Intelligibility as a property

This was the part of the chapter that most interested me, though I think it might be doubling down on themes touched on for other blog posts. On page 56, Mason writes, "Something is intelligible if someone can understand it. If someone can understand something, it is intelligible. So is intelligibility sort of a property?"

As I see it based on this quote, it seems that Mason is now trying to separate intelligibility from understanding so they are not just defined with each other. The big question is whether or not it (intelligibility) lies in a realm separate from human definition or dependent on it. Is it like mass, an empirical property, or something like 'easiness,' which we define on a case-by-case basis?

And here, as I think about this, I'm worried that I'm sliding into meaningless relativity. After reading further, I found myself nodding in agreement as Mason writes on page 63, "A text can be unintelligible in the simple sense that no one can or could make anything of it. But intelligibility in principle does call for the strongest possible context...someone could understand it." I kind of took that to mean that, in the long run, nothing is unintelligible. We may not know enough to find meaning in something, whether it's an ancient text or an element of physics of which we didn't even realize there was significant, but that doesn't mean it's unintelligible because at some point in the ever-extending past or future, someone could have or could get it.

Shouldn't it be more complicated than that? I feel like I might be missing something. And doesn't that line of thinking invite "false intelligibility." If someone sees the shape of a dog in a random cloud, does it now mean something? (And what does that have to do with understanding?)