use–mention distinction
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The use–mention distinction is a foundational concept of analytic philosophy, according to which it is necessary to make a distinction between a word (or phrase) and it.Devitt and Sterelny (1999) pp. 40–1 W.V. Quine (1940) p. 24 Many philosophical works have been "vitiated by a failure to distinguish use and mention". The distinction can sometimes be pedantic, especially in simple cases where it is obvious. The distinction between use and mention can be illustrated with the word ''cheese'': * ''Use'': Cheese is derived from milk. * ''Mention'': 'Cheese' is derived from (the Anglian variant of) the
Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
word ''ċēse'' (). The first sentence is a statement about the substance called "cheese": it ''uses'' the word 'cheese' to refer to that substance. The second is a statement about the word 'cheese' as a
signifier In semiotics, signified and signifier (French: ''signifié'' and ''signifiant'') stand for the two main components of a sign, where ''signified'' pertains to the "plane of content", while ''signifier'' is the "plane of expression". The idea was f ...
: it ''mentions'' the word without ''using'' it to refer to anything other than itself. Note the quotation marks.


Grammar

In written language, ''mentioned'' words or phrases often appear between single or double quotation marks (as in "The name 'Chicago' contains three vowels") or in
italics In typography, italic type is a cursive font based on a stylised form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, italics normally slant slightly to the right. Italics are a way to emphasise key points in a printed ...
(as in "When I say ''honey'', I mean the sweet stuff that bees make"). In philosophy, single quotation marks are typically used, while in other fields (such as linguistics) italics are much more common. Style authorities such as '' Strunk and White'' insist that mentioned words or phrases must always be made visually distinct in this manner. On the other hand, ''used'' words or phrases (much more common than mentioned ones) do not bear any typographic markings. In spoken language, or in absence of the use of stylistic cues such as quotation marks or italics in written language, the audience must identify mentioned words or phrases through semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic cues. If quotation marks are used, it is sometimes customary to distinguish between the quotation marks used for speech and those used for mentioned words, with double quotes in one place and single in the other: * When Larry said, "That has three letters", he was referring to the word 'bee'. * With reference to 'bumbershoot', Peter explained that "The term refers to an umbrella". A few authorities recommend against using different types of quotation marks for speech and mentioned words and recommend one style of quotation mark to be used for both purposes.


In philosophy

The general phenomenon of a term's having different references in different contexts was called '' suppositio'' (substitution) by medieval logicians. It describes how one has to substitute a term in a sentence based on its meaning—that is, based on the term's referent. In general, a term can be used in several ways. For nouns, they are the following: * Properly with a ''
concrete Concrete is a composite material composed of fine and coarse aggregate bonded together with a fluid cement (cement paste) that hardens (cures) over time. Concrete is the second-most-used substance in the world after water, and is the most wi ...
and real referent'': "That is my ''pig''" (assuming it exists). (personal supposition) * Properly with a ''concrete but unreal referent'': "Santa Claus's pig is very big." (also personal supposition) * Properly with a ''generic referent'': "Any ''pig'' breathes air." (simple supposition) * Improperly by way of ''metaphor'': "Your grandfather is a ''pig''". (improper supposition) * As a ''pure term'': "'''Pig has only three letters". (material supposition) The last sentence contains a mention example. The use–mention distinction is especially important in analytic philosophy. Failure to properly distinguish use from mention can produce false, misleading, or meaningless statements or category errors. For example, the following sentences correctly distinguish between use and mention: * 'Copper' contains six letters, and is not a metal. * Copper is a metal, and contains no letters. The first sentence, a mention example, is a statement about the word 'copper' and not the chemical element. The word is composed of six letters, but not any kind of metal or other tangible thing. The second sentence, a use example, is a statement about the chemical element copper and not the word itself. The element is composed of 29 electrons and protons and a number of neutrons, but not any letters.
Stanisław Leśniewski Stanisław Leśniewski (30 March 1886 – 13 May 1939) was a Polish mathematician, philosopher and logician. Life He was born on 28 March 1886 at Serpukhov, near Moscow, to father Izydor, an engineer working on the construction of the Trans-Sib ...
was perhaps the first to make widespread use of this distinction and the
fallacy A fallacy is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning, or "wrong moves," in the construction of an argument which may appear stronger than it really is if the fallacy is not spotted. The term in the Western intellectual tradition was intr ...
that arises from overlooking it, seeing it all around in analytic philosophy of the time, for example in Russell and Whitehead's ''
Principia Mathematica The ''Principia Mathematica'' (often abbreviated ''PM'') is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics written by mathematician–philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. ...
''. At the logical level, a use–mention mistake occurs when two heterogeneous levels of meaning or context are confused inadvertently. Donald Davidson told that in his student years, "quotation was usually introduced as a somewhat shady device, and the introduction was accompanied by a stern sermon on the sin of confusing the use and mention of expressions." He presented a class of sentences like which both use the meaning of the quoted words to complete the sentence, and mention them as they are attributed to
W. V. Quine Willard Van Orman Quine (; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". ...
, to argue against his teachers' hard distinction. He said that quotations could not be analyzed as simple expressions that mention their content by means of
naming Naming is assigning a name to something. Naming may refer to: * Naming (parliamentary procedure), a procedure in certain parliamentary bodies * Naming ceremony, an event at which an infant is named * Product naming, the discipline of deciding wh ...
it or describing its parts, as sentences like the above would lose their exact, twofold meaning.
Self-referential Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philoso ...
statements mention themselves or their components, often producing logical
paradox A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically u ...
es, such as
Quine's paradox Quine's paradox is a paradox concerning truth values, stated by Willard Van Orman Quine. It is related to the liar paradox as a problem, and it purports to show that a sentence can be paradoxical even if it is not self-referring and does not use d ...
. A mathematical analogy of self-referential statements lies at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorem (
diagonal lemma In mathematical logic, the diagonal lemma (also known as diagonalization lemma, self-reference lemma or fixed point theorem) establishes the existence of self-referential sentences in certain formal theories of the natural numbers—specificall ...
). There are many examples of self-reference and use–mention distinction in the works of Douglas Hofstadter, who makes the distinction thus: Although the standard notation for mentioning a term in philosophy and logic is to put the term in quotation marks, issues arise when the mention is itself of a mention. Notating using italics might require a potentially infinite number of typefaces, while putting quotation marks within quotation marks may lead to ambiguity. Some analytic philosophers have said the distinction "may seem rather pedantic". In a 1977 response to analytic philosopher John Searle, Jacques Derrida mentioned the distinction as "rather laborious and problematical".


See also

* * * * * * * * *


Notes


References

* Derrida, Jacques (1977) ''Limited Inc abc ...'' in ''
Limited Inc ''Limited Inc'' is a 1988 book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, containing two essays and an interview. The first essay, "Signature Event Context," is about J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act outlined in his ''How To Do Thing ...
'' * Michael Devitt,
Kim Sterelny Kim Sterelny (born 1950) is an Australian philosopher and professor of philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. He is the winner of several international prizes ...
(1999
''Language and reality: an introduction to the philosophy of language''
* W.V. Quine (1940
''Mathematical Logic''
§4 ''Use versus mention'', pp. 23–5 * Wheeler, Samuel (2005) ''Davidson as Derridean: Analytic Philosophy as Deconstruction'' in ''Cardozo Law Review'' Vol. 27–2 November 200
''Symposium: Derrida/America, The Present State of America's Europe''


Further reading

* A. W. Moore (1986
''How Significant Is the Use/Mention Distinction?''
in ''Analysis'' Vol. 46, No. 4 (Oct. 1986), pp. 173–179


External links

*

, by William A. Wisdom, c. 2002 *

, by Ralph E. Kenyon, Jr. PhD, 29 December 1992, Revised 21 October 1993, Published in ''Etc.: A Review of General Semantics'', Vol. 51 No 1, Spring 1994. (accessed: 26 August 2006). *
The evolution of Confusion
, talk by Daniel Dennett AAI 2009, 4 October 2009 {{DEFAULTSORT:Use-mention distinction Analytic philosophy Concepts in the philosophy of language Metalogic Conceptual distinctions