Today I have been reading chapter 6 of the book “Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language” by Bjorn Ramberg (borrowed from the same library, i.e. the library of the Philosophy department) and, on the second page already, I noticed that in the sentence “The interpreter in this situation has nothing to go on but what she sees the native speakers do and the sounds she hears them utter”, there was a line drawn over the first “she” (and a faint line over the second one which I only saw now). The first thought that came into mind was that this was done accidentally. Turning to the next page, I realized that this was not the case… In the whole first half of the chapter, the (very nasty and obviously too masculine) reader has patiently turned most of the occurences of the word “she” to “he” by crossing out the “s” and he even turned some “her”s to “his”s! Shall I, being a female, take it as an insult? Or is it the case that indeed we shouldn’t believe that women can possibly be intepreters? I don’t know. And I am realy wondering what intetions might be hidden behind this behaviour.

Moral: People who write in library books deserve to be stabbed with their pencils indeed!

Rob: If you do it in pencil I’ll forgive you (and buy an eraser). I might even have some suggestions as to what you should look out for…