Use-mention distinction
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The use-mention distinction is the distinction between using a word (or phrase, etc.) and mentioning it. In written language, mentioned words or phrases often appear between quotation marks or in italics; some authorities insist that mentioned words or phrases always be made visually distinct in this manner. Used words or phrases (more common than mentioned ones) do not bear any typographic distinction.
For example, the sentence
- Cheese is derived from milk.
is a statement about the substance cheese, and involves the use of the word cheese, while the sentence
- Cheese is derived from a word in Old English.
is a statement about the word cheese, and involves the mention of the word cheese.
Despite making the distinction, it should also be noted that mentioning an expression is usually purposeful and thus a use in itself.
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[edit] Usage
Putting a statement in quotation marks and attributing it to its originator is a useful way of turning a disputed statement about a subject into an undisputed statement about another statement.
Making a statement mention itself can produce logical paradoxes. There are many examples of this phenomenon in the works of Douglas Hofstadter, and this trick more or less lies at the core of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.
For example, the two versions of a seemingly paradoxical statement below can be interpreted to have two distinct meanings, the second of which resolves the apparent paradox:
- The use-mention distinction is not strictly enforced here.
- The use-mention distinction is not strictly enforced here.
[edit] Use-mention and suppositio
The general property of terms changing their reference depending on the context was called suppositio (substitution) by classical logicians. It describes how one has to substitute a term in a sentence based on its meaning—that is, what referent the term has. In general, a term can be used in several ways. For nouns, they are:
- Properly with a real referent: "That is my cow" (assuming it exists). (personal supposition)
- Properly with a generic referent: "Any cow gives milk." (simple supposition)
- Properly but with a non-real referent: "Ulysses's cow was big."
- Improperly by way of metaphor: "Your sister is a cow". (improper supposition)
- As a pure term: "Cow has only three letters". (material supposition)
The last use is what invokes the use-mention distinction.
[edit] Use-mention in philosophy
The use-mention distinction is especially important in analytic philosophy. The standard notation for mentioning a term is to put it in single quotes. Failure to properly distinguish use from mention can produce false or misleading statements, so care should be taken to avoid that circumstance:
- 'Copper' contains six letters, and is not a metal.
- Copper is a metal, and contains no letters.
[edit] See also
- List of distinctions
- Map-territory relation
- Quasi-quotation
[edit] External links
- "Robert And The Use-Mention Distinction", by William A. Wisdom, c. 2002
- "On the use of Quotation Marks", 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)
