“Scans” means the sentence is plausible. Not having read the article, I can’t say I agree or disagree.
I could expound on the grammatical structure and syntactical components of the sentence but I have to confess I’m too lazy to do so.
Basically, humanities have their own specific discourse communities and looking at an article that assumes prior knowledge can be usefully compared to starting with a paper on relativity theory without having understood Newtonian mechanics.
My apologies to any scientistic types I may have offended.