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I'm unnerved by the typography in this book. Each chapter has two sub-sections (the 'normal' narration and the 'Inigo's dream' parts), and these look visually so different that at first i assumed they had, for some reason, increased the line height in the Inigo's-dream parts.

some counting of lines on pages later, it seems they haven't, though; instead they set these parts in a different font (fair enough for things set in a 'different universe' — i'm not far enough along to know what that means tho), which is thinner than the normal one, so it leads to the page overall looking lighter. It also looks like the same font they use for chapter headings, where (printed larger) it looks a lot better imho than in normal text.

or at least i think this is what's happening; it's hard to be too sure since pages don't have a constant number of lines (which is normal, anyways — though some paragraphs still have their first line immediately before a page break), and also the text block sort of wanders higher/lower between pages, which ig is also fair for cheap printing

So i left this book lying around for some while but picked it up again now, and by chance had stopped at the end of chapter 1, so now read §7 (the first part of chapter 2), which happens to contains the first mention of "Gavagai", which is basically the reason i'm reading this book.

Chapter 1 was basically setup for this: it talks mostly about how language depends on previous experience, and can't really be separated from it (but "speakers of the same language have perforce come to resemble one another").

But then gavagai is about what to do if that fails, which he calls "radical translation": what to do if there is no shared history, no interpreter, nothing? The linguist in the quote might guess it means 'rabbit', but how can they be sure? if they ask a native "gavagai?" while pointing at a rabbit, how could they even distinguish agreement from disagreement? (can they even be sure the native speaker understands what the "pointing" gesture means?)

The whole story has (afaict) become a bit of a classic for talking about this, but honestly i find it uncomfortable: why does Quine have the linguist ask the native questions, then guess from the reactions, gradually trying to improve? What about the native, can't they decide to maybe teach this confused person walking around pointing at random things and asking "gavagai"? Even if they speak entirely unrelated languages, surely the linguist's perception of the 'natives' will be informed by preconceptions about how 'natives' behave? (Quine's is, at least; why else are all examples about rabbits and a giraffe?)

I dunno, I'm not sure this actually makes any difference to the point he's trying to make — could the linguist even tell if the native's trying to teach them? —, except, well, Quine works pretty hard to construct a situation in which the language learner has all the agency and at the same time acts as an observer mostly separated from the situation (i wonder if there are surviving accounts from the few cases in recorded history where truly "radical" translation had to be done? how did they do it? i bet it wasn't this one-sided a process)